Christina

Rossetti
C U R R E N T LY AVA I L A B L E
BLOOM’S MAJOR POETS
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Christina
Rossetti
© 2004 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
Haights Cross Communications.

http://www.chelseahouse.com

Introduction © 2005 by Harold Bloom.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Christina Rossetti / Harold Bloom, editor.

p. cm. — (Bloom’s major poets)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-7892-2
1. Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 1830-1894—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Women and literature—England—History—19th century.
I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series.
PR5238.C49 2004
821’.8—dc22
2004013703

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 CONTENTS

User’s Guide 7
About the Editor 8
Editor’s Note 9
Introduction 10
Biography of Christina Rossetti 12

Critical Analysis of “Goblin Market” 14

Critical Views on “Goblin Market” 18
Steven Connor on the Links between
“Goblin Market” and Rossetti’s Other Works 18
Herbert F. Tucker on “Marketing” Victorian Society 21
Winston Weathers on Sisterhood and Self 27
Terrence Holt on the Forces at Work in the Poem 29
Mary Arseneau on Symbolic Interpretation 34
Catherine Maxwell on the Fruits of
Rossetti’s Imagination 42
Richard Menke on the Materiality of the Poem 49
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra on the Poetic Fantasy 56
Jerome J. McGann on Religious Allegory 62

Critical Analysis of “Remember” 73

Critical Views on “Remember” 75
Harold Bloom on the Uses of Remembrance 75
Margaret Reynolds on Alternative Readings
of the Poem 75

Critical Analysis of “A Birthday” 83

Critical Views on “A Birthday” 85
Harold Bloom on Dante Gabriel and
Christina’s Influence on Each Other 85
Lynda Palazzo on the Means of Representation 87
Richard D. Lynde on the Natural World and Imagery 90
James F. Doubleday on the Juxtaposition of Images 93
Critical Analysis of “Up-Hill” 94
Critical Views on “Up-Hill” 95
Harold Bloom on the Meaning of the Poem 95
Eugene J. Brzenk on the Links Between
“Up-Hill” and “Amor Mundi” 97
Eugene Zasadinski on Religious Interpretation
and Symbolism 102
Jerome McGann on Rossetti’s Doctrine and the Poem 107
John Hollander on the Allegorical Reading 110

Works by Christina Rossetti 113

Works about Christina Rossetti 115
Acknowledgments 117
Index of Themes and Ideas 120
 USER’S GUIDE
This volume is designed to present biographical, critical, and
bibliographical information on the author and the author’s best-
known or most important poems. Following Harold Bloom’s
editor’s note and introduction is a concise biography of the
author that discusses major life events and important literary
accomplishments. A critical analysis of each poem follows, trac-
ing significant themes, patterns, and motifs in the work. As with
any study guide, it is recommended that the reader read the
poem beforehand and have a copy of the poem being discussed
available for quick reference.
A selection of critical extracts, derived from previously pub-
lished material, follows each thematic analysis. In most cases,
these extracts represent the best analysis available from a number
of leading critics. Because these extracts are derived from previ-
ously published material, they will include the original notations
and references when available. Each extract is cited, and readers
are encouraged to check the original publication as they contin-
ue their research. A bibliography of the author’s writings, a list of
additional books and articles on the author and their work, and
an index of themes and ideas conclude the volume.
 ABOUT THE EDITOR
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale
University. He is the author of over 20 books, and the editor of
more than 30 anthologies of literary criticism.
Professor Bloom’s works include Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959),
The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats
(1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism
(1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American
Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of
Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996).
The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s
provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great
writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a 1998 National Book
Award finalist, How to Read and Why (2000), Stories and Poems for
Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages (2001), Genius: A Mosaic
of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), and Hamlet:
Poem Unlimited (2003).
Professor Bloom earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in
1955 and has served on the Yale faculty since then. He is a 1985
MacArthur Foundation Award recipient and served as the
Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University
in 1987–88. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious American
Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism.
Professor Bloom is the editor of several other Chelsea House
series in literary criticism, including BLOOM’S MAJOR SHORT
STORY WRITERS, BLOOM’S MAJOR NOVELISTS, BLOOM’S MAJOR
DRAMATISTS, BLOOM’S MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS,
BLOOM’S MODERN CRITICAL VIEWS, BLOOM’S BIOCRITIQUES,
BLOOM’S GUIDES, BLOOM’S MAJOR LITERARY CHARACTERS, and
BLOOM’S PERIOD STUDIES.

8
 EDITOR’S NOTE
My Introduction centers upon Goblin Market as an allegory of
Christina Rossetti’s struggle for poetic individuation against the
powerful influence of John Keats.
Nine analyses of Goblin Market follow, all of them useful, but
those by Herbert Tucker and Jerome McGann seem to me truly
distinguished instances of authentic scholarly interpretation.
On the poignant “Remember,” I emphasize the five different
meanings the title receives in the sonnet, while Margaret
Reynolds reminds us how riddling this astonishing lyric poet
tended to be, since doubling is her characteristic mode.
“A Birthday” is seen by Lynda Palazzo as set in the Rossetti
family’s context, after which the superb “Up-Hill” is illuminated
in very contrasting ways by Jerome McGann’s theological learn-
ing and John Hollander’s poetics of rhetoric.

9
 INTRODUCTION

Harold Bloom
Christina Rossetti (1830–94) is one of a handful of major English
devotional poets, together with John Donne, George Herbert,
Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughn, and her contemporary, the
Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. One might expect the beloved
sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to manifest a marked difference
from other poets of religious sensibility. Like the Pre-
Raphaelites, her style and procedures stem from Keats and
Tennyson, rather than Donne and Herbert, but then Hopkins
also is Keatsian in mode.
Goblin Market doubtless is Christina Rossetti’s masterpiece,
and rightly has become a favorite text for feminist literary
criticism. It fascinates and disturbs me, and though I have
included it complete in two anthologies, I never have
commented upon the poem, for reasons I can only surmise. In a
sense it is poetry for children, though indeed they have to be
extremely intelligent children of all ages. Thus they could resist
the current academic interpretations: Marxist, feminist, lesbian-
incestous, or imagistic self-gratification, at once erotic,
mercantile, and even vampiric.
There certainly is a struggle going on in Goblin Market, but it
seems to me an agon for poetic incarnation, for the establishment
of a strong poetic self. I don’t suppose that Christina Rossetti
would have accepted John Keats’s Scene of Instruction less
ambivalently if he had been a woman, since strong poets are not
particularly given to communal quilt-making. What troubles
Goblin Market is not only Keats’s magnificent oxymoronic
rhetoric but also his naturalistic humanism. Keatsian eroticism is
totally free of the melancholy sound of church bells. Christina
Rossetti’s intense faith was intricately fused with an erotic
temperament as exuberant as her brother Dante Gabriel
Rossetti’s, and her lifelong renunciation (so far as we know) of
sexual experience testifies to a rather frightening strength of will,
or of faith if you would have it so. The Tempter in Goblin Market

10
is in any case John Keats and not John Keble, or Romanticism
rather than the Oxford Movement of Anglican Revivalism.
I hasten to insist that I find it grotesque to identify the
Goblins as male precursor poets: Milton, Keats, Tennyson, and
D.G. Rossetti and his friends. The nursery rhyme stylistics of
Goblin Market are wonderfully effective swerves away from
Keatsian celebrations of natural abundance, but they defend
against glories of language, and not against gendered dangers.
That Goblin Market is an open-ended allegory is its finest
attribute. Such irony invests deeply in the fantastic, challenging
us to behold our own idiosyncratic phantasmagoras. Perhaps
Friedrich Schlegel’s definition of irony as the “permanent
parabasis of meaning” could not be better exemplified than by
Christina Rossetti’s most ambitious poem.

11
 BIOGRAPHY OF

Christina Rossetti
Christina Georgina Rossetti was born in London on December
5, 1830, to Gabriele and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti. Both of her
parents were of strong religious temperament. Her father was an
Italian living in exile, and her mother was of Italian and English
origin. The house she was born into was quite lively, playing host
to visiting Italian revolutionaries and writers, but she was also
subject to the teaching and religious devotion of her mother
Frances. Her father Gabriele was a poet and translator, and her
uncle John Palidori was Byron’s physician and author of “The
Vampyre.”
Rossetti’s home was bilingual, and all of the children in her
family were artistic and scholarly. The oldest, Maria Francesca,
was a Dante scholar, and her brother Gabriel Charles Dante
(who would change his name to Dante Gabriel) became a poet
and a painter. William Michael, the younger of the two brothers,
became a critic and biographer, and later edited and published
commentaries on the poems and letters of his siblings.
Christina is said to have been a very spirited child, and there
are wild reports about her youthful temper. These anecdotes
stand in contrast to the descriptions of the poet by her brother
William in the biography he wrote, which gives us an image of a
restrained, almost docile poet with self-discipline to spare. Her
early childhood was punctuated by visits to her maternal
grandfather’s country home, which was surrounded by fruit trees
and fields. Eventually, this same grandfather would move to the
city and set up a printing press, which would then print Rossetti’s
first volume of poetry, “Verses: Dedicated to Her Mother”. In
1848 she became engaged to James Collinson, one of the minor
Pre-Raphaelites. His reversion to Roman Catholicism would
soon end the engagement.
In 1853 Christina’s father became ill, and his eyesight began to
deteriorate. Christina and her mother started a day school to try
and support the family, which was not sustainable. After this
episode Christina would become more and more reclusive,

12
suffering from a recurring illness which was sometimes diagnosed
as angina and sometimes tuberculosis. Her own family feared for
her health starting at a young age, starting as early as 1845, and she
seems to have been in a near constant state of nervous exhaustion.
The Rossetti children worshiped their mother, but Christina’s
relationship was especially close with her. Due in part to her bad
health, her mother served as both confidant and nurse, and all of
Christina’s books of poetry were dedicated to her. Both women
shared a clear and strong sense of spiritual devotion. Rossetti
herself was influenced by the Oxford Movement, which wanted
to restore a sense of Catholic Grandeur to the Anglican church,
reinforcing the ritualistic elements of the Catholic service. Later
in her life, Christina would write extensive commentaries on
parts of the bible, and she was a strict observer of fast days and
the liturgical calendar.
It is important, however, not to dwell on what is outwardly
pious in the biography of Rossetti. She remained friends with her
brothers her entire life. William was a free-thinking atheist, and
Dante Gabriel is legendary for his sensuality. In addition, her
letters show the extent of her contact with other poets and her
generosity with young writers. She was also a member of a group
called the ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,’ formed in 1848 by her
brothers. She was not allowed to attend their late night meetings,
but her early poems were published by the brotherhood’s journal,
“The Germ.”
Her first publicly printed book of poetry was “Goblin Market
and Other Poems,” published in 1862 to widespread acclaim and
popularity. In 1866, Rossetti was again proposed to, this time by
Charles Bagot Cayley, a Dante scholar and former student of her
father. William, after her death, found a series of love poems in
Christina’s desk that suggest that she loved Cayley very deeply,
although while living, she refused him because of his religious
skepticism.
She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled
physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante’s breakdown in
1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were
outwardly quiet ones. She died of cancer December 29, 1894.

13
 C R I T I C A L A N A LY S I S O F

“Goblin Market”
Goblin Market is a poem full of lists that describes something to
be avoided, but the poet seems to take pleasure in this act of
prohibited description. Each fruit seems more luscious and
delightful than the last, and generally the atmosphere of the
poem is one where objects are barely allowed to remain inert.
For people, one epithet is not enough, and even those must be
listed:

Laura stretched her gleaming neck

Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.

Restraint is a condition felt according to the remembrance of its

future parting. The description is of Laura listening to the goblin
men, and one is not sure whether the dock is restraining the
vessel, or even if the vessel wants to leave. The very mechanism
of simile has been somewhat impugned by the goblin men,
whose voices sound “like voice of doves”, “kind and full of loves
/ in the pleasant weather”. In the poem, two sisters who live
together, Laura and Lizie, are exposed to a group of goblin
merchants as they go about the nightly task of gathering water
from a local brook. While we are told that the goblins are active
“morning and evening”, it is at “twilight” that their voices seem
most audible, when “sound” is most “to eye”. It is Laura who
succumbs, who “chooses” to linger, and she is lulled by the voices
of the goblin men, voices that sound to her “like voice of doves /
cooing all together”. And it is this relation that is troubling
throughout the poem. What is initially conceived as a malign
phantasmal presence—that of the goblins—is also part of the
beneficent aspect of fantasy. There is a thin line between the
persuasive, goblin-like exhortations of the vendors and the

14
cooing of doves that “sounded kind and full of loves / in the
pleasant weather” which their cries sometimes resemble. The
voice of the goblin is at once “shrill” and iterable and capable of
achieving “tones as smooth as honey”. The gloss that this
complexity deserves may not be the simple one, among others,
that the poem affords: “Twilight is not good for maidens”.
There is, in the poem, a synthetic principle that extends from
the perils of the natural world to the bastion of the human. It is
a liquid one. I take an example from just after Laura enters into
bargaining with the Goblins:

“Buy from us with golden curl.”

She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,
Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flowed the juice.

The standard of comparison, of value, is as follows. The lock of

hair is as valuable as the actual money that Laura is unable to
produce. The tear that Laura lets fall, of joy and of sorrow both,
is “more rare than pearl”, and so in some sense beyond nature,
while related to it by comparison. The liquid juice of the goblin
fruit, which is omnipresent during the story, is “clearer than
water”. After tasting it, Laura “knew not was it night or day”, and
is clearly in the twilight. However, it is the principle of luscious
simile-based description itself that may be as sweet as the
imagined fruit; regardless, the poem forces us to conceive of a
material pleasure (with the imagination of the body) in order to
register the weight of the figurative.
The punishment for such pleasure, we learn from the example
of Jeanie, is to stay “ever in the noonlight”. This inspires a state
of longing in which the symptoms are a watering mouth and a
“longing for the night” that feels like an “absent dream”. This
resembles, curiously, the need that brings the women to the
brook each night, and so makes them vulnerable, that of thirst. It
is in the evening that the sisters go “with pitchers to the reedy

15
brook”, and it is the imagery of water in the poem that makes its
appeal general. The image of longing for things past in the poem
involves tears:

One day remembering her kernal-stone

She set it by a wall that faced the south;
Dewed it with tears, hoped for a root,
Watched for a waxing shoot,
But there came none;
It never saw the sun,
It never felt the trickling moisture run:
While with sunk eyes and faded mouth
She dreamed of melons, as a traveller sees
False waves in desert drouth
With shake of leaf-crowned trees,
And burns the thirstier in the sandful breeze.

It is worth remembering that the source of the goblin fruits

sweetness is involved in what they drink. Laura imagines that it
is thanks to the “pure wave that they drink”, a brook into which
lilies drop their “sugar sweet sap”, that the fruit is so good.
Longing is an image of thirst just as thirst is a cause of longing.
Laura is able to taste the fruit once, and suffers passively
afterwards, by denial. The night that Laura goes to repeat her
feast, only her uninitiated sister can hear the goblins, and Laura
goes home “her pitcher dripping all the way”, a victim of
“baulked desire”.
Human want is the cause of the market in this poem, and
money functions both when actual money is only gestured
towards, and when real silver coins are being used. Symbols are
exchangeable in the poem, as a lock of hair can seem to replace a
coin. It is, however, also with a coin that Lizzie rescues her sister.
She hands the goblins a silver piece that is then returned to her,
which makes possible, in a figurative way, the return of her sisters
hair, who can only regain her youth once Lizzie has attempted to
buy fruit for her. It is the sound of the returned coin bouncing in
Lizzie’s purse that restores the fictive music. She hears the coin
“bouncing in her purse / its bounce was music to her ear. / She

16
ran and ran / as if she feared some goblin man”. Like Laura,
Lizzie after her exchange with the Goblins “knew not was it
night or day”, but her confusion is an “inward laughter” rather
than melancholy.
The exchanges between the sisters and the goblin men are
resolved when one of the sisters, Lizzie, decides to exchange
herself for Laura. Laura gives us a version of this: “Lizzie,
Lizzie, have you tasted / for my sake the fruit forbidden?” It is
only after this moment that Laura’s eyes can be, somewhat
paradoxically, “refreshed” by “tears”, tears that drop “like rain /
after long sultry drouth”. It is also after Laura exchanges her own
fate for that of Lizzie that we are given the ultimate description
of Laura’s condition, a description made possible by her re-
tasting the fruit from off of her sister’s body, and finding it bitter
and strange:

Pleasure past and anguish past,

Is it death or is it life?

Life out of death.

That night long Lizzie watched by her,
Counted her pulse’s flagging stir,
Felt for her breath,
Held water to her lips, and cooled her face
With tears

17
 CRITICAL VIEWS ON

“Goblin Market”
STEVEN CONNOR ON THE LINKS BETWEEN “GOBLIN
MARKET” AND ROSSETTI’S OTHER WORKS

[Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and

Theory at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has
also written and edited books on James Joyce, Charles
Dickens, and Samuel Beckett. His recent publications
include The Book of Skin, and Dumbstruck: A History of
Ventriloquism.]

Goblin Market remains one of the most persistently puzzling

poems of the nineteenth century; familiarity has seemed to
increase rather than to diminish our uncertainty about its form,
style, meaning, and even content. The poem has been treated too
much, however, as sui generis, without reference to the rest of
Christina Rossetti’s work and especially to her other writing for
children.1 The aim of this brief essay is to make the links
between her other work and Goblin Market a little clearer and
thus to throw light on some of the peculiarities of this poem, as
well as to suggest ways in which Christina Rossetti’s poetry as a
whole shares with Goblin Market the capacity to unsettle.
First, it is important to note the power which nursery rhyme
had over Christina Rossetti; indeed the title of the volume of
nursery rhymes which she published hints at the kinds of
attraction which the form had for her, particularly its tendency to
organize meaning and expression in terms of pair and antithesis.
Critics have noted this predominance of pairings and opposites
in Christina Rossetti’s own poetry: the pairing relationship of
sisterhood, for instance,2 or the pairing and counterposing of
different conditions of existence, the earthly and the
transcendental, or indeed the dualistic sense displayed in many of
the very titles of the poems, such as “Life and Death,” “He and
She,” “One Foot in Sea and One on Shore,” and “From Sunset
to Star-Rise.”3 This pattern is restated in the dialogic form of

18
many of her lyrics and similarly in many of the nursery rhymes
in Sing-Song which are poised in the hesitant space between
question and answer:

Why did baby die,

Making Father sigh,
Mother cry?

Flowers that bloom to die

Make no reply
Of “Why?”
But bow and die.4

But more than this, Christina Rossetti found in nursery rhyme

that same attention to the density of language which is a feature
of many of her lyrics. Released from reference to the real world,
or even to a strongly experienced world of feeling, her verse
often enacts in the shifting of its appositions a drama which is to
be apprehended at the level of the signifier:

Ah changed and cold, how changed and very cold,

With stiffened smiling lips and cold calm eyes!
Changed, yet the same. (“Dead Before Death,” pp. 313–314)

There’s blood between us, love, my love,

There’s father’s blood, there’s brother’s blood;
And blood’s a bar I cannot pass. (“The Convent Threshold,” p. 340)

This shifting is displayed in the poem “Cobwebs,” where the

actual subject of the poem recedes into invisibility under the
pressure of the continuous negatives: “no moons or seasons wax
or wane, / ... / No bud time, no leaf-falling, there for aye” (p.
317). The subject slips away behind the elaborate dance of
denials. One of the attractions of nursery rhyme shown in Sing-
Song is the opportunity to indulge the expressivity of a language
emptied of content. This point is obviously of great importance
for the understanding of a poem such as Goblin Market, where
the apparent garrulousness of the verse is an enactment quite as
much as a representation of sexual/linguistic energy. This is not

19
to imply, however, that this kind of poetic language is sprawling
or incoherent; we know that Christina Rossetti devoted
considerable time to the writing of these nursery rhymes (and
their translation into Italian). What follows, in fact, is the
conception of language as a game—an essentially closed, self-
sustaining activity. Included under the heading of “Poems for
Children, and Minor Verse” in William Rossetti’s edition of his
sister’s poetry is a series of poems which testify to Christina
Rossetti’s interest in language games. There are riddles (“Two
Enigmas,” “Two Charades,” p. 422), alphabets, counting rhymes,
sonnets written to bouts-rimés, and playful conceits:

A pin has a head, but has no hair;

A clock has a face, but no mouth there;
Needles have eyes, but they cannot see;
A fly has a trunk without lock or key. (p. 432)

or mnemonics:

O Lady Moon, your horns point toward the east;

Shine, be increased:
O Lady Moon, your horns point toward the west;
Wane, be at rest. (p. 442)

The important point about a mnemonic is that it locates within

language, within its chimings and assonances, the ordering of
experience. The signifier becomes self-motivating, turning the
fortuitous into the systematic.

NOTES
1. Aside from the difficult case of Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti wrote
three works specifically for children: Sing-Song: A Nursery-Rhyme Book (London,
1872), Speaking Likenesses (London. 1874), and Maude: A Story for Girls (London,
1897).
2. See Winston Weathers, “Christina Rossetti: The Sisterhood of Self,” VP,
3 (1965), 81–89.
3. See, for instance, Theo Dombrowski, “Dualism in the Poetry of Christina
Rossetti,” VP, 14 (1976), 70–76: Friedrich Dubslaff, Die Sprachform der Lyrik
Christina Rossettis (Halle, 1933), p. 75 ff.
4. The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed. W.M. Rossetti

20
(London, 1904), pp. 425–429. Subsequent references to Rossetti’s poetry will be
cited by page number to this text.

—Steven Connor. “Speaking Likenesses”: Language and

Repetition in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. Victorian Poetry
vol. 22, no. 4, winter 1984: 439–441.

HERBERT F. TUCKER ON “MARKETING” VICTORIAN

SOCIETY

[Herbert F. Tucker is Professor of English at the University

of Virginia. He specializes in Nineteenth-Century English
Literature, and he has written books on Tennyson and
Browning. He is also editor of Victorian Literature
1830–1900 and A Companion to Victorian Literature and
Culture.]

When Christina Rossetti let it fall that in “Goblin Market”

she had written no parable soliciting deep exegesis but a poem to
be taken just as it came, she may have meant to wave the
hermeneutic white flag. In effect, she was dropping the scented
handkerchief. The eldritch embroidery of “Goblin Market” has
probably attracted more, and more various, commentary during
the last two decades than any other poem of its time. It proves on
recent examination to be a poem about communal sorority and
also about patriarchal dominion; about the Christian Eucharist
and also free self-actualization; about diffusive jouissance and
also the therapeutic consolidation of a split soul; about anorexia
nervosa, vampirism, the adulteration of foodstuffs, absinthe
addiction, and the pros and cons of masturbation.1
While so many critical allegories can hardly be mutually
compatible, taken en masse they fortify every reader’s conviction
that, whatever “Goblin Market” means, it is a work instinct with
sex, drugs, rock and roll, or their Victorian equivalents.
Determining what these equivalents might be is a nice task for
critical brokerage; lately the smart money has been placed on
economics. The readings of the poem that make the most
comprehensive sense of its multiplex appeal are the ones that put
the market back in “Goblin Market,” and vice versa; that ask how

21
Rossetti’s masterpiece both, critically reflects upon, and
knowingly takes part in, systems of commodity exchange that
during her lifetime transformed Victorian society and the terms
of her calling as a writer within it.2 To a series of strong
mercantile interpretations published by American scholars
during the 1990s I propose adding what marketing practices of
the later nineteenth century most conspicuously added to the
victorious technologies of capitalism, the element of advertising.
The seductions in—and of—“Goblin Market” were early
warnings—and exploitations—of Victorian styles of market
penetration that, inasmuch as they ventured to influence
behavior by reorienting desire through language, had every claim
on the attention of contemporary poets. This was especially true
for a poet of Christina Rossetti’s age: born in 1830, and cresting
the prime of life in 1862 when her Goblin Market volume was
published, she was young enough to feel the new pitch of
Victorian advertisement as keyed particularly to her generation’s
susceptibilities; yet she was old enough to know better, having
grown up under a more naive promotional dispensation.
From this historically privileged vantage the whole story of
“Goblin Market” in a sense flows, and it goes like this: Laura and
Lizzie, two look-alike alliterative sisters, live together alone
keeping cows, chickens, and bees in a rural neighborhood that
happens to be frequented by goblin men peddling domestic and
imported fruit in the open air around breakfast and supper time.
The sisters are of indeterminate age: young maidens, clearly; yet
old enough to be independent of any parental supervision or
truant officer, to know a cautionary tale or two about those goblin
costermongers, and to qualify for illustration as stunners—
initially by the poet’s brother Dante Gabriel in the first edition of
1862 and then a century later in an unbowdlerized, cut-to-the-
chase version in Playboy magazine that, in case it has not come to
your attention on some former occasion, has been generously
represented in a recent article by Lorraine Kooistra.3 One
evening Laura succumbs to the goblins’ mouth-watering sales
pitch and, though penniless, contracts to barter a lock of her hair
for all the fruit she can eat. Coming home in a nigh bulimic buzz,
she brushes aside her sister Lizzie’s scolding with a promise to go

22
out again the next night and get more fruit for both of them. As
that next night falls, Laura finishes up her farm chores and goes
out cruising for goblin. But she can’t score: frustrated at first to
find no goblin on the scene, she then learns to her horror that,
while Lizzie can hear the vendors as usual, she herself has gone
stone-deaf to their cry.
Sick with desire, Laura wastes away to the point where Lizzie
overcomes scruple and decides to act as her sister’s proxy, taking a
penny in her purse and letting the goblins know she’s ready to
deal. But—in a scene to which we shall return—when Lizzie
orders a pennysworth of fruit on a takeout basis, the goblins insist
that she feast on the spot like her sister. Lizzie declines and
demands her money back, at which point the goblin team really
gets down to business. They mount a hard sell that escalates from
courtesy and advice to insult and threat, cresting at length in the
apotheosis of sales force: resorting to outright personal violence,
they become pushers indeed, crushing fruit against her mouth—
which will not open, however, either to protest or to taste—and
drizzling juice down her chin and neck. Finally the goblins take
no for an answer, reject the penny, and vanish underground or
into thin air. Lizzie races home in an afterglow of ecstatic
renunciation (remember, it’s a Victorian poem) and invites Laura
to “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices ... Eat me, drink me, love me”
(don’t worry, it’s a Victorian poem).4 Aghast at Lizzie’s apparent
sacrifice, yet obedient to an addict’s need, Laura ingests the pulpy
juice, only to have it work as a homeopathic antidote kicking her
into a high-speed delirium, from which she recovers Completely
Cured. An epilogue fast-forwards to later years: both sisters now
being married, Laura makes a habit of summoning her daughters
and nieces—nephews, sons, and husbands somehow need not
apply—to hear her tale of trespass, waste, and redemption and to
learn its lesson that “there is no friend like a sister” (562).

II

Few readers have been entirely at ease with this

overdetermined final scene of instruction. But a convenient back
door opens into the poem when we consider the mode of that

23
instruction, which is overwhelmingly oral: “Laura would call the
little ones / And tell them,” “Would talk about the haunted glen,”
and so forth (548–49, 552; my emphases). The substance of this
oral transmission is manifestly the same as that of the five-
hundred-line poem we have just been reading, whose antically
irregular rhymes breathe a nursery air, and whose supple, frisky
metrics practically have to be sounded out, in the mind’s ear if not
aloud, in order to catch their distinctive, spontaneous music. To
be sure, the ambiguous position of the epilogue, coming after the
story it depends on yet also operatively commands, makes it
impossible to equate the third-person narrative voice with
Laura’s. Besides, as an oral storyteller Laura has a bardic license
to tell her oft-told tale different ways at different sittings, in
contrast to the fixity of the one printed text before us.
At least one hopes she tinkers a bit with her vocabulary: to
imagine the circle of little ones puzzling over terms in the text like
pellucid, purloin, obstreperously, and succous pasture, a thesaurus-
tripper’s periphrasis for juicy food—to imagine the kids reacting to
this gilt-edged diction is to shake off the spell of a naive orality. It
is to recall, that is, how Rossetti, like other Victorian pioneers in
children’s literature, was at work in a compromised mode that owed
its charm to the ways it played reading against listening. The text as
a whole invites us to imagine such a performance as publisher
Alexander Macmillan staged when he read out “Goblin Market,”
shortly before publication, to a skeptical yet eventually enthralled
“working-man’s society,” or again, such a performance as the poet
herself apparently conducted when reading aloud to fallen women
at the shelter in Highgate where she volunteered.5 The text invites
us not just to read it, but to read it to ourselves, to let it talk us into a
mode of virtual orality. And virtual orality, I shall argue, has
everything to do with the economic thematics of Rossetti’s story.
Much of my argument will be found implied, by the reading
ear, in the poem’s opening lines:

Morning and evening

Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy....”
(1–4)

24
The phrase “Come buy” recurs more than a dozen times in
“Goblin Market” as the “iterated jingle” (253) of a
straightforward sales pitch. Yet a vigilant virtual orality has to
wonder how to take it. How is the imagined listener to know
what the reader so plainly sees, that “buy” has a letter u in the
middle of it—to know that the goblins are not freely offering
something (Do come by our orchard some time) but rather
selling something for a price? The listener in the poem knows
what’s up, right away and beyond any doubt: the first thing said
by either of the maids who hear the goblins cry is that “We must
not buy their fruits” (43). That our country maids thus know just
what they are hearing is as sure a sign as any in the poem that
they are conscious denizens of a market economy, where the way
to come by a nice piece of fruit is to come and buy it; where
“Come buy” betokens not hospitality but trade. The verbal
confusion here is all ours, the virtual listeners’; this happens, I
submit, because Rossetti wants us to read verbal confusion as
cultural confusion. Embedded (or endeared, as John Keats might
say) within the reigning order of contract and purchase, she
invites us to recognize an older order of invitation and gift, which
mercantilism has on one hand superseded as clearly as literacy
has superseded orality, yet which on the other hand mercantilism
has less abolished than engrossed, for rhetorical purposes, as a
hidden persuader.6 About this kind of subliminal promotion
Rossetti’s market-wise maids seem clueless: Lizzie means to
reinforce her sister’s “We must not buy” when she declares,
“Their offers should not charm us, / Their evil gifts would harm
us” (65–66; my emphases); but the way her declaration
confounds purchase with donation, confounds the boughten with
the given (via the ambiguously offered), would do a politician
proud. And this confusion discloses something about the
promotional strategy that underwrites the goblins’ deceptively
straightforward “Come buy.”

NOTES
1. See, inter alia, Dorothy Mermin, “Heroic Sisterhood in Goblin Market,”
Victorian Poetry 21 (1983): 107–18, and Helena Michie, “ ‘ There Is No Friend
Like a Sister’: Sisterhood as Sexual Difference,” ELH 56 (1989): 401–21; Mary

25
Arseneau, “Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford
Movement, and Goblin Market,” Victorian Poetry 31 (1993): 79–93, and Linda E.
Marshall, “ ‘ Transfigured to His Likeness’: Sensible Transcendentalism in
Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’ ” University of Toronto Quarterly 63 (1994):
429–50; Paula Marantz Cohen, “Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’: A
Paradigm for Nineteenth-Century Anorexia Nervosa,” University of Hartford
Studies in Literature 17 (1985): 1–18, and Deborah Ann Thompson, “Anorexia as
a Lived Trope: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’ ” Mosaic 24 (1991): 89–106;
David F Morrill, “ ‘ Twilight Is Not Good for Maidens’: Uncle Polidori and the
Psychodynamics of Vampirism in Goblin Market,” Victorian Poetry 28 (1990):
1–16; Shelley O’Reilly, “Absinthe Makes the Tart Grow Fonder: A Note on
‘Wormwood’ in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market,” Victorian Poetry 34 (1996):
108–14; Paula Bennett, “ ‘ Pomegranate-Flowers’: The Phantasmic Productions
of Late-Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Women Poets,” in Solitary
Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism, ed. Paula
Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario II (New York, 1995), 189–213.
2. Elizabeth Campbell, “Of Mothers and Merchants: Female Economics in
Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’ ” Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 393–410;
Terrence Holt, “ ‘ Men Sell Not Such in Any Town’: Exchange in Goblin
Market,” Victorian Poetry 28 (1990): 51–67; Elizabeth K. Helsinger, “Consumer
Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’ ” ELH 8
(1991): 903–33; Richard Menke, “The Political Economy of Fruit: Goblin
Market,” in The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts,
ed. Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Athens,
Oh., 1999), 105–36.
3. Lorraine Kooistra, “Modern Markets for Goblin Market,” Victorian Poetry 32
(1994): 249–77.
4. Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market,” lines 468–71, from The Complete
Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. R.W. Crump, vol. 1 (Baton Rouge, 1979),
hereafter cited parenthetically by line number in my text.
5. Alexander Macmillan to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 28 October 1861, quoted
in The Rossetti–Macmillan Letters, ed. Lona Mosk Packer (Berkeley, 1963), 6–7.
Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London, 1994), 218–38,
stresses the Highgate Penitentiary connection.
6. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” line 13, in Complete Poems, ed. Jack
Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass., 1978). Subliminal allusion alert: this phrase comes
from Vance Packard’s popular exposé of subliminal advertising, The Hidden
Persuaders (New York, 1957).

—Herbert F. Tucker. “Rossetti’s Goblin Marketing: Sweet to

Tongue and Sound to Eye.” Representations 82, spring 2003:
117–120.

26
WINSTON WEATHERS ON SISTERHOOD AND SELF

[Winston Weathers is Professor Emeritus of English at the

University of Tulsa. In his career he established himself as
a scholar of Victorian Poetry, and he has published many
articles on Christina Rossetti.]

Christina confesses herself, in her allegory, “A Royal Princess,” a

great awareness of self.

All my walls are lost in mirrors, whereupon I trace

Self to right hand, self to left hand, self in every place,
Self-same solitary figure, self-same seeking face.

And in these lines she confesses not only an awareness of self, but
of fragmented self, for the phrase, “self to right hand, self to left
hand,” suggests the dichotomy of personality into differing, if
not antithetical, forces.
These forces of the self Christina allegorizes in her poems
dealing with sisterhood. The various sisters which appear in her
work are the mythic characters in her psychological drama, and
such poems as Goblin Market, “A Triad,” “The Queen of Hearts,”
“Sister Maude,” “Noble Sisters,” and many others provide her
commentary on the varying actions and interactions which occur
within the inner being. Time and time again, Christina brings
two sisters together—sometimes three—in moments of crises,
letting them debate with one another, struggle with one another,
in mythic action that illustrates both a subtle understanding of
self on Christina’s part and a tragic realization of fragmentation
that belies the calm, serene exterior that Christina presented to
the world. Not recounting real experience, not revealing
homosexual predilections, the sister poems are simply Christina’s
discussion of psychological truths which she witnessed in herself
and which are universally significant in that all our personalities
are subject to an analysis into parts, whether we call those parts
“the brothers and sisters of our soul” or, with Freud, the ego,
superego, and id.

27
 The prototypal poem in Christina’s myth of the self is, of
course, Goblin Market. In this early and most famous poem,
Christina creates her essential characters—Laura and Lizzie—
and moves them through a drama that leads from innocence and
integration to sickness and fragmentation back to a newer and
more mature balance, represented in part by the marriage of the
sisters and their assumption of marital responsibility. One need
not identify the two sisters and the goblins too precisely in order
to recognize the resolution that occurs. That the two sisters are
aspects of one self is evident when they are described as being
“like two blossoms on one stem” and “locked together in one
nest,” yet that they are different from one another is evident in
their very actions. Laura, whose “restraint is gone” and Lizzie,
who is “full of wise upholdings,” respond in their different ways
to the goblins who parade before them. The goblins, obviously,
are some state of mind, some mental experience that is both
attractive and destructive, both exotic and visionary at the same
time it is immensely real. One would not go too far astray, it
seems, to recognize in the goblins and their wares a kind of
imaginative, fanciful, visionary—even hallucinatory—state of
mind that is escape from reality, beautiful escape at the same time
it is intellectually destructive. To see in the goblins simply the
sexual or the sensuous is to limit their role in Christina’s myth
and limit their function. No doubt sex and sensuality are there,
but other mysterious regions of the mind and of the self also exist
that lure one to psychological death. The whole fairy-tale
machinery, the animal shapes of the goblins suggest what a
bizarre nature the goblin experience was to Christina herself and
suggest whole inexplicable areas of detachment from reality.
Such Nietzschean terms as Apollonian and Dionysian may help
us understand the fundamental drama of Goblin Market. The
different phases of human nature which Laura and Lizzie represent
are similar to those Nietzsche recognized, principally in The Birth
of Tragedy, as eternal polarities of self, the one, the Dionysian,
leading to tragedy, the other, the Apollonian, leading to survival.
The Dionysian aspect of self is pulled strongly toward the whole
ritualistic fulfillment that Laura experiences with the goblins, while
the Apollonian self holds back from the make-believe, the visionary

28
and ritualistic “reality” in preference for a more logically-oriented
reality, a more objective, exterior world. Not that Lizzie is unaware
of the goblins and that potential state of mind. The whole self is
aware of the goblins. But whereas one part of self surrenders to
illusion and an essentially intensional accommodation to life, the
other part of self struggles to maintain a distance from the deep,
archetypal, even primordial freedom and makes, in turn, an
essentially extensional accommodation to existence.
Laura comes near her death in surrendering to a myth that can
be imagined from afar but which cannot be accepted as a
replacement for reality. Stepping into that state of mind which
the goblins represent, Laura finds herself in that pathological
state which modern psychiatry has dealt with so extensively and
which is, indeed, a deep illness. All of Laura’s symptoms
following her purchase of the goblin fruit are those of the
mentally ill. Withdrawing from reality into that illusion of the
goblins, Laura finds herself in that pitiful trap of having lost
contact with one reality only to find its supposed replacement to
be air and vacancy. Lizzie, the remaining fragment of the whole
self, must now struggle to integrate again, to become one whole
person again, and to do this she must face up to the very illusory
state of mind—the goblin market—that is the “snake pit” for
Laura. In sound psychiatric fashion, Lizzie re-enacts the goblin
experience, meets it face to face in a kind of therapeutic
recognition, without actually succumbing to it, and by doing so
is able to pull Laura back from the brink.
—Winston Weathers. “Christina Rossetti: The Sisterhood of
Self.” Victorian Poetry vol. III, 1965: 81–83.

TERRENCE HOLT ON THE FORCES AT WORK IN THE

POEM

[Terrence Holt has published “ ‘ Men Sell Not Such in Any

Town’: Exchange in Goblin Market”.]

In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

observe that Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market has become a

29
“textual crux for feminist critics” (p. 566). Gilbert and Gubar
themselves see in it a bitter renunciation of literature—of an art,
they argue, that is (and perhaps can only be) male.3 More
recently, Dorothy Mermin has described Goblin Market as an
assertion of women’s literary power. The two readings seem
impossibly opposed, suggesting that another, unacknowledged,
force is at work within the text, a force that neither reading sees
whole.
One such force within Goblin Market is economic. Economic
language and metaphors, terms of finance and commerce (“buy,”
“offer,” “merchant,” “stock,” “money,” “golden,” “precious,”
“sell,” “fee,” “hawking,” “coin,” “rich,” etc.) permeate the poem,
which opens with an extended invitation to the market:
“Morning and evening / Maids heard the goblins cry: / ‘Come
buy our orchard fruits, / Come buy, come buy.’ ” 4 The phrase
“come buy” echoes throughout the poem, its iteration stressed
by the description of it as the goblins’ “shrill repeated cry” (l. 89),
their “customary cry, / ‘Come buy, come buy,’ / With its iterated
jingle / Of sugar-baited words” (ll. 231–234). Economic
metaphors inhabit apparently innocent words: the cry is
“customary” because it solicits the custom of Lizzie and Laura;
the words “jingle” not only because of their iteration,5 but
because they evoke the jingle of coin (cf. ll. 452–453). That the
goblins are costermongers, economic creatures as well as sexual
ones, suggests that sexual and economic systems of relation may
intersect in other ways as well.6
Despite the pervasiveness of the goblins’ cry, however, the
ostensible function of this discourse of the marketplace is to
stress the difference between maidens and goblins. Exchange,
Goblin Market claims, is the province of goblins, not of girls.
Indeed, Lizzie and Laura seem to know instinctively that “We
must not look at goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits” (ll.
42–43). The market is dangerous to maids, who belong safely at
home. This emphasis on difference is of course partly a matter of
sexual difference. But this is not so much an interest in the
prurient possibilities of difference as an attempt at keeping the
sexes apart. A separation between maidens and goblins must be
preserved, the poem warns, because commerce with goblins is

30
dangerous to maids. The goblins’ glen is “haunted” (l. 552), and
has caused the death already of one maid (ll. 147–161). Lizzie’s
virtuous horror of the place (ll. 242–252) alludes to a nameless
threat, but her delicate evasion only pretends to conceal the
obvious: the threat is the proverbial fate worse than death.
The sexual threat in the glen touches as well on another
concern in Goblin Market, the place of women in the literary
world. The glen echoes with a literary tradition that has used
women as sexual scapegoats. The “bowers” (l. 151) from which
these fruits are plucked parody a similar snare in Spenser, the
Bower of Bliss; Laura’s reaction to this low, swampy place (ll.
226–227) suggests its affinity with the Slough of Despond in The
Pilgrim’s Progress.7 A woman who enters the glen, especially a
woman writer, places herself in a historical context that assigns
her a negative value on the literary exchange.
A difference between maidens and goblins must be preserved,
furthermore, because commerce with the goblins is also
potentially infectious: the threat in the goblins’ glen is not only
that one may be attacked by them; but that one may become like
them. Their victims become as “restless” (l. 53) as the brook that
whispers there, a restlessness like the “Helter skelter, hurry
skurry” (l. 344) activity that typifies the goblins. Lizzie,
counseling her sister to keep away, assumes that separation can
enforce difference, an assumption echoed in the two passages
that introduce us to the sisters’ home.
Home in Goblin Market seems the opposite of the goblins’
glen, isolated from the world of commerce. The first scene in the
home (ll. 184–198) stresses the sisters’ isolation, in implicit
contrast to the goblins’ prolific trade. The home is also a scene
of busy industry, wherein the sisters produce healthful foods
independently of the marketplace, foods that differ pointedly
from the goblins’ exotic fruits:

Early in the morning

When the first cock crowed his warning,
Neat like bees, as sweet and busy,
Laura rose with Lizzie:
Fetched in honey, milked the cows,

31
 Aired and set to rights the house,
Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,
Cakes for dainty mouths to eat,
Next churned butter, whipped up cream,
Fed their poultry, sat and sewed;
Talked as modest maidens should:
Lizzie with an open heart,
Laura in an absent dream,
One content, one sick in part;
One warbling for the mere bright day’s delight,
One longing for the night. (ll. 199–214)

The sisters produce foods for their own consumption, enacting

on an economic level the hermeticism of their domestic scene.
The description of the sisters as they set to work compares them
to bees, and the simile is peculiarly apt: they are bee-like not only
in the quiet hum of their industry, but especially in their self-
sufficiency, producing with their own labor the food that sustains
them.
The sisters themselves glean from nature the raw materials of
food they produce at home, and have no need to resort to the
market to trade for someone else’s wares. By contrast, the
goblins’ wares may not even have been, originally, their own.
Lizzie’s question about their fruit—“Who knows upon what soil
they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots?” (ll. 44–45)—questions the
root-origins of those fruits; the goblins have the look of
middlemen, and their fruits, coming from a tropic distance, seem
far from their native soil. This goblin capital is thus doubly
alienated, an alienation that makes the sisters’ apparently
uncomplicated and direct nourishment by the land yet another
sign of their difference from the commercial goblins.
The repeated journeyings back and forth between market and
home make this difference literal, defining a physical distance
between them. The two are separated by an extensive waste (l.
325), a steep bank (l. 227), and a gate (l. 141). The goblins
themselves stress the difference between the two places in their
conversation with Lizzie, who wants to take some of their fruit
back to succor her dying sister: “Such fruits as these / No man
can carry; / Half their bloom would fly” (ll. 375–377), they tell

32
her. Indeed, the failure of the “kernel-stone” to grow goblin-fruit
at the sisters’ home (ll. 281–285) reinforces their message. The
two places belong to different biological (and moral) orders, a
difference that, despite Laura’s despair, is ultimately consoling: if
that kernel had grown, what havoc might its fruit have wrought
in the sisters’ domestic haven?
But the repeated distinctions between the glen and the home,
which seem intended to assert the sisters’ independence from
goblin economics, are not as absolute as they seem. The home is
inescapably involved in economics—as the word’s Greek root,
oikonomia (“management of a household”), suggests. The
domestic is historically a scene of economic exploitation, prison
and workhouse as much as haven.8 Goblin Market expresses the
potential involvement of the home in exchange in part by the
very strength of its attempt to evade such involvement.9
The insistence on the separation between the two realms
cannot conceal the home’s contamination by exchange. Even in
our first view of it, Laura already keeps house in an “absent
dream,” “sick in part” and “longing for the night” (ll. 211–214).
She only seems like a modest maiden; inside, the goblin’s
poison is working in her veins. The honey they gather is
tainted: it has appeared already in the poem, literally in a
goblin’s mouth. “In tones as smooth as honey” (l. 108), the
goblins hawk their wares to the sisters. The honey not only
sustains the home but is at the same time an inducement to go
outside it, to partake in the system of exchange that invades and
undoes that world.

NOTES
3. Gilbert and Gubar, p. 575. For phallogocentrism see Jacques Lacan, Ecrits:
A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pp. 281–291; Jane Gallop,
Reading Lacan (Ithaca,1985), pp. 133–156; Luce Irigary, Speculum of the Other
Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, 1985), pp. 13–129; Shoshana Felman,
“Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy,” Diacritics 5, no. 4 (1975): 2–10,
and “Rereading Femininity,” YFS 62 (1981): pp. 19–44; and Mary Jacobus,
Reading Woman (New York, 1986), pp. 83–196, esp. pp. 110–136.
4. Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, in The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti,
ed. R.W. Crump (Baton Rouge, 1979), 1:11–26, ll.1–4. All further quotations
from this edition appear parenthetically by line number within the text.
5. For the role of iterability in linguistic circulation, see Jonathan Culler, On

33
Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, 1982), p. 102.
6. See Catherine Gallagher, “More about ‘Medusa’s Head,’ ” Representations 4
(Fall, 1983): 55–57, for discussion of costermongers as emblems of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century anxieties about economic and gender roles.
7. Spenser’s villainesses typify the monstrous-feminine as defined in Julia
Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New
York, 1982), pp. 1–31; the rhetoric of scum, filth, and blood in Bunyan’s
description of Christian’s family as well as the Slough draws heavily on the
religious vocabulary Kristeva also identifies (pp. 56–89) with the “holy abject.”
8. Gilbert and Gubar, p. 570; see also pp. 122–126, 134–137, 171–180,
289–291, 381, 382, 545, 558–559, and Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the
Woman Writer: Ideology As Style in the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary
Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago, 1984), pp. 3–47.
9. For discussion of the futility of such evasions see: Sigmund Freud, “The
Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud (London, 1953–74), 17:219–252; Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genres,”
Glyph 7 (1980): 202–232; and Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality (New York,
1980), 1:1–50.

—Terrence Holt. “Men sell not such in any town”: Exchange in

Goblin Market. Victorian Poetry vol. 28, no. 1, spring 1990: 51–54.

MARY ARSENEAU ON SYMBOLIC INTERPRETATION

[Mary Arseneau is an Associate Professor in the

Department of English at the University of Ottawa. She is
the co-editor of The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female
Poetics and Victorian Contexts. She has also written articles on
John Keats and Dante Alighieri.]

If we place Goblin Market within the larger context of Rossetti’s

thoughts on religion, poetry, and symbol, we will find that
certain fundamental habits of thought evident throughout her
writing can help us to understand Goblin Market as a paradigm of
the kind of symbolic interpretation in which Rossetti wanted her
readers to engage. The importance of Lizzie and Laura’s
attempts to interpret their experiences in the poem can be better
appreciated by reading Goblin Market in light of Rossetti’s own
statements on the ways in which the individual should respond to
the beauty and temptations that the world offers. In this regard,
it is crucial that we recognize that one of the most fundamental

34
assumptions underlying Rossetti’s poetry is her theologically
based belief that the created world is capable of communicating
moral and spiritual meaning, or, in her own words, that “All the
world over, visible things typify things invisible.”2 There were
several influences in Rossetti’s life that would have encouraged
this belief, but by far the most important was the impact of the
intense incarnationalism and sacramentalism of the Oxford
Movement.
Critics have often noted that Rossetti first came under the
influence of the Oxford Movement in 1840, and that by 1843,
when thirteen years of age, she had begun regularly attending the
High Church services at what Canon Henry W. Burrows calls
“the leading church” in the Oxford Movement at that time—
Christ Church, Albany Street.3 I would like to pursue this
formative connection further by considering the influence that
Tractarian habits of thought had on Rossetti’s conceptions of
symbolism and interpretation and by demonstrating how
Rossetti’s understanding of symbolism sheds important light on
Goblin Market. The Tractarians saw the incarnation as the vital
core of the Church, its sacraments, and God’s plan for humanity’s
redemption.4 In addition to this intense incarnationalism, the
Tractarians were known for their sacramentalism, a term which
refers both to their reverence for the sacraments of the Church
and to the broader concept of their awareness of the
transcendent as sacramentally and analogically present in the
material world and in human life. This belief was not lost on
Rossetti: as Raymond Chapman observes, the Oxford Movement
deeply affected Rossetti’s habits of thought by teaching her that
“the visible and invisible worlds were not sharply separated” (p.
194). In Rossetti’s poetry and prose this belief is manifested in
her consistent emphasis on the need to read things and events in
a spiritual light.
The Oxford Movement’s influence on Rossetti, moreover,
extended beyond the strictly theological. In Victorian Devotional
Poetry: The Tractarian Mode, G.B. Tennyson examines the wide
influence that Tractarian poetry and poetics had on the
sensibilities of the Victorian age, and in his postscript he
delineates briefly the necessity and advantages of seeing Rossetti

35
as an inheritor of Tractarian poetics. Indeed, there is ample
evidence that she was familiar with the poetry of such prominent
Tractarians as John Henry Newman, Isaac Williams, and John
Keble;5 but by far the most important evidence of Rossetti’s
contact with Tractarian poetics is a copy of John Keble’s
extraordinarily popular and influential volume, The Christian
Year.6 In her copy of this book Rossetti marked certain titles in
the table of contents, highlighted numerous passages with
vertical lines in the left margin, underlined individual lines, and
drew in the top margins a pencil illustration to accompany each
poem.7 Given this evidence, it is imperative that we consider
what Rossetti might have absorbed from her study of Keble.8
According to Keble, God had originally created human beings
as belonging at once both to the natural and supernatural worlds.
However, as a result of original sin, the direct link between the
human and the supernatural world was severed; the world ceased
to be an image of the supernatural and became instead a mere
shadow of it. According to Keble, postlapsarian nature was
restored by the incarnation and by Christ’s sacrifice, which made
nature a sacramental symbol of the divine. Christ’s incarnation is
thus the source of the analogy which is central to Keble’s poetic.
However, in the time since the incarnation, the material world
has become “much more alluring for its own sake” (Beek, p. 78),
and the result is that people have been blinded to the symbolic
meaning of the material world. Through God’s gift of grace, the
moral sense, which has been clouded by sin, is restored. This
moral sense is inseparable from the “symbolic sense” in Keble’s
philosophy; the moral sense leads the individual to God, but only
because the symbolic sense enables him or her to see the
symbolic representations of the supernatural world within the
physical world that God has created.
As her copy of The Christian Year demonstrates, Keble’s
sacramental aesthetic was noted by Rossetti. Diane D’Amico
states that “the most obvious distinction between marked and
unmarked stanzas is that the marked ones could all be spoken by
Rossetti herself ”;9 but more importantly, an examination of
Rossetti’s copy also reveals that she often marked passages
describing the emblematic, educative, and sacramental qualities

36
of creation. The following marked lines clearly refer to the
ongoing presence of Christ in the world:

There’s not a strain to Memory dear,

Nor flower in classic grove,
There’s not a sweet note warbled here,
But minds us of Thy Love.
O Lord, our Lord and spoiler of our foes,
There is no light but Thine: with Thee all beauty glows.
(“Third Sunday in Lent,” ll. 49–54)

Through the ongoing effect of the incarnation Christ’s presence

informs earthly beauty; the duty then falls on the Christian to
search for Christ in this world and to attempt to understand the
world in terms of Christ and the incarnation. Rossetti notes these
following lines that counsel the Christian to look for Christ in
everything: “Let not my heart within me burn, / Except in all /
Thee discern” (“Evening,” ll. 23–24).
For Rossetti, the profoundly spiritual possibilities of
symbolism in poetry and nature are enabled by the descendental
motion of a God who makes Himself available to humankind,
especially through that central Christian event and symbol, the
incarnation. Rossetti conceives of the incarnation as working on
many levels to bridge the gap between the material world and a
higher, spiritual one: in the person of Christ, divinity and
humanity coexist; in the sacramental system instituted by Christ,
and in particular in the Eucharist, divine grace becomes available
through a physical form; and through the incarnation establishes
a principle of analogy between the earthly and the divine, making
nature the symbol of the divine and forging a link between the
spiritual and the physical. But Rossetti also emphasizes that the
human consciousness must transcend the material world, an
action which complements the descendental motion enacted by
God. The link between heaven and earth is thus similar to Jacob’s
ladder with its continuous and simultaneous ascending and
descending motion (Genesis 28.12). The transcendental
movement is realized in the interpretative acts of the individual
(whether a character in a poem or the reader of it) who attempts
to give a moral and symbolic reading to things and events, and

37
who in doing so attempts to look through the physical toward an
analogous spiritual realm. Rossetti is advocating this mode of
perception in this passage from her commentary on the Ten
Commandments, Letter and Spirit:

We should exercise that far higher privilege which appertains to

Christians, of having “the mind of Christ;” and then the two
words, visible and invisible, will become familiar to us even as
they were to Him (if reverently we many say so), as double against
each other. (p. 131)

For Rossetti, such penetrating interpretation is enabled by a

consciousness of the spiritual, for without spiritual discernment
there can be no real understanding of the natural and material.
She emphasizes in Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies
of the Benedicite:

Thus we learn that to exercise natural perception becomes a

reproach to us, if along with it we exercise not spiritual
perception. Objects of sight may and should quicken us to
apprehend objects of faith, things temporal suggesting things
eternal. (p. 180)

The natural world has an important part to play in Rossetti’s

theology and aesthetics, for while she recognizes it as a lesser good
than the heavenly reward to which she aspires, this world remains
an important avenue to God. We learn about God through His
creation, and we work toward our own salvation according to how
we think and act in this world. But Rossetti (like Keble) is also
extremely wary of the physical world, worried that the attractions
of the material and sensory can distract the individual from the
higher purpose of achieving salvation. According to Rossetti, the
world must be constantly subordinated to the heavenly reward: “It
is good for us to enjoy all good things which fall to our temporal
lot, so long as such enjoyment kindles and feeds the desire of better
things reserved for our eternal inheritance” (Seek and Find, p. 180).
This world is beautiful and good, but only if it serves as a stepping
stone to help the individual know and love God; as Rossetti writes
to her brother William Michael’s future wife, Lucy Madox Brown,

38
“When earth is an anteroom to heaven (may it be so, of God’s
mercy to us all), earth itself is full of beauty and goodness.”10 But
Rossetti also often worried that the material world is capable of
leading one away from God:

O LORD Jesus Christ, King for ever and ever, suffer not the
kingdoms of the world or the glory of them to enslave any heart
from Thy free service. Let not the worldly influence sway us, or
worldly glory dazzle us, or this vain life enthrall us in its shadow,
or riches weigh us down to earth, or pleasure slay us. Amen.
(Annus Domini, p. 40)

Typically, despite her great appreciation for natural beauty,

Rossetti is suspicious that what is appealing to the senses can also
be dangerously capable of distracting one from proper priorities.
In attempting to reconcile, on the one hand, her desire to see
the world as a sign of God and, on the other, her fear that in
loving the world too much a person can become blind to spiritual
realities, Rossetti achieves a poetically and spiritually satisfying
balance between the two through the use of natural images which
comprehend the appeal of physical beauty while dedicating the
physical to her higher purpose of explaining how the material
world must be transcended: “This is not my orchard for fruit or
my garden for flowers. It is however my only field whence to
raise a harvest” (The Face of the Deep, p. 333). This image of the
harvest, with its rich biblical echoes,11 is a seamless merging of
natural and spiritual fruition and resounds throughout Goblin
Market and Other Poems, from the harvest scene of the title poem
that signals Laura’s spiritual renewal12 to the highly evocative
gathering of sheaves in the final poem:

It is over. What is over?

Nay, how much is over truly:
Harvest days we toiled to sow for;
How the sheaves are gathered newly,
Now the wheat is garnered duly. (“Amen,” ll. 1–5)

Rossetti often explicitly tells her readers to search for spiritual

messages in the natural world, but in a more “reserved” way (to

39
use a Tractarian term) her highly symbolic use of natural images
also acts as a model of how necessary it is to read all natural
things for the deeper symbolic meanings they convey. The
harvest image is typical of Rossetti’s symbols in its effortless
wedding of the natural image with religious meaning; in doing
this it embodies the meaning and method of Rossetti’s
symbolism.
In Goblin Market, the sisters Lizzie and Laura both hear the
goblin men’s tempting offers of luscious fruit. Lizzie rejects the
fruit as “evil,” while Laura is tempted and indulges. After eating
the goblin fruit, Laura’s health and peace of mind deteriorate;
and Lizzie realizes that she must procure some of the goblin fruit
in order to save her sister’s life. Lizzie goes to purchase the fruit;
she refuses to eat with the goblin men who torment her and try
to force her to eat, but she manages to withstand and then runs
home to Laura, who is cured by tasting the juices smeared on
Lizzie’s face. Many critics have regarded temptation as the
thematic core here, but even more fundamental to the poem is
the problem of the interpretation of things and events, the task
of giving things a right moral reading; and Keble’s description of
the “symbolic sense” as one of the moral sense’s “constituent
elements” (Beck, p. 78) helps clarify why the ability to read
symbolically plays an integral role in Lizzie’s, Laura’s, and the
reader’s moral interpretation of things and events in the poem.
Any symbolic and moral reading in and of Goblin Market
necessarily must grapple first with the meaning of the goblin
fruit. Many critics have seen the goblin fruit as the forbidden
fruit of sexual sin; however, as D’Amico points out in “Eve, Mary,
and Mary Magdalene: Christina Rossetti’s Feminine Triptych,”
when Rossetti considers the first human sin, Eve’s eating of the
forbidden fruit, she does not interpret it in sexual terms: “For
Rossetti, Genesis was primarily a warning against disobedience,
not lust.”13 The passage from Letter and Spirit that D’Amico cites
shows that Rossetti considered Eve’s sin to be in her preferring
“various prospects to God’s will” and diverting her “ ‘ mind’ ...
from God Almighty” (p. 179). Bearing this in mind, we may do
well to look in Goblin Market, not for evidence of a sexual fall, but
for evidence of a turning away from God.

40
NOTES

2. Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (London,
1879), p.309. Seek and Find was the second of Rossetti’s six volumes of devotional
prose, preceded by Annus Domini (London, 1874) and followed by Called to be
Saints (London, 1881), Letter and Spirit (London, 1883), Time Flies (London,
1885), and The Face of the Deep (London, 1892). Subsequent references to these
works will be cited in the text with title and page number.
3. Henry W. Burrows, The Half-Century of Christ Church, St. Pancras, Albany
Street (London, 1887), p. 14. For the most full treatments to date on Rossetti’s
connection to the Oxford Movement, see G.B. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional
Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981); Raymond
Chapman, Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence of the Oxford
Movement (London, 1970); the final chapter of Katherine J. Mayberry, Christina
Rossetti and the Poetry of Discovery (Baton Rouge, 1989); and Diane Apostolos-
Cappadona, “Oxford and the Pre-Raphaelites from the Perspective of Nature
and Symbol,” JPRS 2 (1981–82): 90–110.
4. Eugene R. Fairweather, The Oxford Movement (New York, 1964), p. 14.
5. A catalogue of Books from the Libraries of Christina, Dante Gabriel, and
William Michael Rossetti indicates that Christina’s library contained a rare first
edition of Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius, published in 1866 ([London,
1973], p. 27). Rossetti’s first biographer, MacKenzie Bell, tells us that Rossetti
also had a great regard for the Tractarian poet Isaac Williams, author of Thoughts
in Past Years, The Cathedral, The Baptistery, The Altar, and of two important
tracts, “On Reserve in Communicating Christian Knowledge” (Christina Rossetti:
A Biographical and Critical Study [Boston, 1898], p. 184); and we have the
supporting evidence of an 1881 letter to Dante Gabriel, in which she quotes
Williams approvingly, saying the quotation “is a couplet (Isaac Williams) I
thoroughly assent to” (The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed.
William Michael Rossetti [London, 1908], p. 103). We also know that when she
was writing Seek and Find, she consulted Isaac Williams’ A Harmony of the Four
Evangelists (1850).
6. John Keble, The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and
Holydays Throughout the Year, 16th ed. (Oxford, 1837). All subsequent references
will be cited in the text with poem title and line number. I would like to thank
Susan Rossetti Plowden and Stephen Plowden for their generosity in allowing
me to study this volume.
7. Diane D’Amico suggests that we can infer from the presence of these
illustrations that the book was being studied and illustrated by Rossetti during
the late 1840s, “for during that time she began to show an interest in developing
any artistic talent she might have had and in using that talent to illustrate
poetry.” Furthermore, a poem copied onto one of its blank pages indicates that
Rossetti was still using this book frequently after 1859, and one of Rossetti’s
marginal notes indicates that she was reading The Christian Year sometime after
1866 (“Christina Rossetti’s Christian Year: Comfort for the Weary Heart,” VN 72

41
[Fall 1987]: 36, 41); thus, there can be no denying that Rossetti did give The
Christian Year considerable attention and returned to it over an extended period
of time.
8. W.J.A.M. Beek’s John Keble’s Literary and Religious Contribution to the
Oxford Movement (Nijmegen, 1959) provides a good overview of Keble’s
theological and poetical position.
9. D’Amico, p. 40.
10. The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti, p. 39.
11. For example, Christ’s parable of the wheat and the tares in Matthew’s
Gospel specifically identifies the sowing of good seed and its due harvest with
the heavenly reward: “The Kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which
sowed good seed in his field” (13.24). But in the parable an enemy, whom
Christ identifies as the devil (13.39), secretly plants tares among the wheat. At
harvest time the tares are picked and burned (the hellish punishment of the
wicked) while the sheaves of wheat are gathered into the barn. When seen in
this context, the image of the harvest involves a theme ever present in
Rossetti’s life and poetry: the need to make oneself worthy of salvation.
Moreover, in the Bible, this image of the harvest is specifically linked with the
need to work toward a spiritual reward: “for whatsoever a man soweth, that
shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap
corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life
everlasting” (Galatians 6.7–8).
12. Goblin Market, ll. 530–542. All quotations from Rossetti’s poetry are
from The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. R.W. Crump, 3 vols. (Baton
Rouge, 1979–90). Subsequent references will be cited in the text.
13. Diane D’Amico, “Eve, Mary, and Mary Magdalene: Christina Rossetti’s
Feminine Triptych,” in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent
(Ithaca, 1987), p. 179.

—Mary Arseneau. “Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina

Rossetti, the Oxford Movement, and Goblin Market.” Victorian
Poetry vol. 31, no. 1, spring 1993: 79-84.

CATHERINE MAXWELL ON THE FRUITS OF ROSSETTI’S

IMAGINATION

[Catherine Maxwell is Senior Lecturer in the Department

of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of
London. Her most recent work is The Female Sublime from
Milton to Swinburne and she has also written articles on
Browning and Thomas Hardy.]

42
Sandra M. Gilbert’s reading of Goblin Market offers a useful
parallel to my proposed reading because it also sees the poem as
allegory, though in this case it is an allegory of limitation. For
Gilbert, the poem pictures the woman writer who wishes to
experience the full fruits of her imagination, but Rossetti, too
much bound by conventions, is unable to let herself or her female
characters have this freedom. Rebellious Laura must suffer for
her impetuosity when she gives in to her desire to eat the goblin
fruit. However, prudent Lizzie intervenes to save her sister and
restore her to the safe but conservative sphere of home. The
focus in this reading is as much on the initially conflicting desires
of the sisters as on the encounters with the goblin men.
Nonetheless, the reading as a whole is supported by a wealth of
allusions to men’s texts and patriarchal traditions. The biblical
story of the Fall in Genesis, Milton’s retelling of this story in
Paradise Lost, the New Testament narrative of Christ’s
temptation, and the Eucharistic liturgy are identified as
underlining the poem’s moral message about temptation and
redemption, its “bitter repressive wisdom.” Gilbert also cites
Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” as an analogy to
(rather than an influence on) Goblin Market, but while she sees
Keats’s poem as daring advocacy—“Art ... is ultimately worth any
risk”—she roundly condemns Rossetti’s poem for playing safe.
While Gilbert’s allegory does not specify direct male sources
for the poem, it does identify the goblins with male precursors:

the goblin men ... are of course integrally associated with

masculinity’s prerogatives of self-assertion, so that what Lizzie is
telling Laura (and what Rossetti is telling herself ) is that the risks
and gratifications of art are not “good for maidens,” a moral
Laura must literally assimilate.... Young ladies like Laura ... and
Christina Rossetti should not loiter in the glen of imagination,
which is the haunt of goblin men like Keats and Tennyson—or
like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his compatriots of the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Furthermore the allegory associates the goblin fruits with the

literary imagination: “works of art—the fruits of the mind.”
Laura is seen as “metaphorically eating words.” Gilbert never

43
quite declares that these artful verbal fruits are poems. I would
propose that not only are they poems but that they are men’s
poems. The fruit is directly identified as goblin produce (“goblin
fruits”). Its flesh and juice, described as “Goblin pulp and goblin
dew” (470), suggest that it partakes of the same bodily nature as
the goblin men, that it is a synecdoche for the goblins’ own
fleshly, masculine, and potent juices. However, Rossetti evokes
multiple echoes that connect the fruits not only with masculinity
but with male-owned or male-identified texts.
The most fundamental references are biblical. The scriptures
not only belong to a venerable patriarchal tradition, they are also
regarded by Protestants as the Word of God, authored by his
Holy Spirit. The forbidden fruit consumed by Eve in Genesis is
the exclusive property of the paternal Creator God. This fruit,
which confers knowledge of good and evil, has the capacity to
make the partaker intellectually powerful like God who,
recognizing the threat of usurpation, ejects the disobedient
human couple from Eden before they gain immortality by eating
from the Tree of Life (Gen. 4:22). Human beings are punished
for eating God’s fruit, but in the New Testament they are actively
encouraged to redeem themselves and have “eternal life” by
ingesting the Word of God as embodied in Christ. Christ’s
redeeming blood, symbolized by wine, revives Old Testament
fruit imagery, as does his claim to be “the true vine” (John 15:1).
Fruit and the male body are also connected in the Old Testament
Song of Solomon. Most modern readers would read the Song
simply as an erotic poem but, in the interpretation traditionally
approved by ecclesiastic authority, the Song is a spiritual allegory
of Christ’s relationship to his Bride, the Church, conveyed
through a series of sensual love lyrics. At the beginning of the
Song, the female speaker identifies her lover with apple trees and
their fruit—fruit that will satiate her longing for him. “As the
apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among
the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his
fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting
house, and his banner over me was love. Stay me with flagons,
comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love” (Song 2:3–5).
These biblical texts form a web of associations which connect

44
fruit with male authority and knowledge as well as with the male
body and its potency.
But Rossetti is also trading on the associations formed by the
male poetic tradition. Milton, often seen as the father of modern
poetry, launches the figure of potent fruitfulness into English
verse when he retells the story of the Fall in Paradise Lost.
Milton’s serpent enlarges on the Biblical serpent’s tempting
promise “ye shall be as gods” (Gen. 3:5) in a flood of eloquence,
declaring that the tree’s fruit has not harmed but rather
empowered him. Impressed by the evidence that the fruit “Gave
elocution to the mute,” Eve succumbs to temptation and eats the
“intellectual food.” Milton’s emphasis on the superior powers of
articulation bestowed by the fruit, powers exercised by Eve
immediately after eating, strengthen the links between fruit and
verbal artistry. Like Eve who returns home to try out her
persuasive speech on Adam, fallen Laura returns to Lizzie,
meeting her sister’s reproachful warnings with a paean in praise
of the banquet she has just consumed. Her language, notably
more elaborate than anything previously voiced by the maidens,
now directly imitates the goblin men’s persuasive cries, but it is
also infiltrated by Romantic poeticisms such as “pellucid,”
“odorous,” “mead,” and “velvet.” She continues her oral
gratification by filling her mouth with verbal evocations of the
pleasure-giving fruit that has stimulated both her physical
appetite and her love of language.
Milton describes the Tree of Knowledge as infused with
“sciential sap, derived / From nectar, drink of gods.” This
inspiring, honey-sweet juice, the sap of Edenic forbidden fruit,
seeps into the writings of his male followers, where it is imbibed
by Rossetti. In Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” the faery’s
seduction of the knight-at-arms involves a bewitching song and
enchanted foods—“roots of relish sweet, / And honey-wild, and
manna dew.” Rossetti revises Keats’s “faery’s song” into the
goblins’ “iterated jingle / Of sugar-baited words” (233–34) and
“tones as smooth as honey” (108), and glamorizes Keats’s
sweetmeats into an altogether more exotic collection of fruits,
which seduces the reader as much as it does Laura. However, the
glamour she imparts to them is partly derived from other

45
Keatsian texts such as “The Eve of St. Agnes” (30.265–70) where
luscious fruits are an aid to seduction. Keats’s more earthy
“roots” (and thus some of the roots of Rossetti’s poem) are
preserved in Laura’s ingenuous question about sources—“Who
knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots?”
(44–45)—and Keats’s knight, stricken as he is, nonetheless offers
us and Rossetti an example of the powers of the creative
imagination under enchantment.
Coleridge’s visionary youth in “Kubla Khan” is also drunk
with his inheritance from Milton: “For he on honey-dew hath
fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise,” and Tennyson, too,
experiences the enticement of the sap “liquid gold, honeysweet”
which fills the closely guarded apples of “The Hesperides” (“The
luscious fruitage clustereth mellowly, / Goldenkernelled,
goldencored / Sunset ripened”) and the sedative enchanted fruits
of “The Lotos-Eaters.” Both these Tennyson poems are about
the allure of poetic imagination. The first and earlier poem
defends the place of the imagination, founded on its likeness to
Milton’s Eden, against all who try to rob it of its fruitfulness. The
second poem reminds us of “The Palace of Art” with its
admonitions about the poet isolating himself from the “real”
world, but the actual recreation of Lotos-land is dreamily
evocative enough for us to understand it as a temptation.
Rossetti, allured by the visions of her male predecessors, is an
intruder in the Hesperean garden of English poetry. Her goblin
men and goblin fruits are her way of indicating a tradition of
male-authored poems that use fruit, fruit-juice, and honey-dew
as motifs for imaginative inspiration and poetic influence, and
her poem shows how women poets can claim their place in this
tradition by appropriating this “sciential sap” for themselves
through theft. In this, Goblin Market resembles the strategies of
female authorship discussed by Patricia Yaeger in her book
Honey-Mad Women, which employs the image of honey stealing
and drinking to illustrate the woman writer’s relationship to the
male tradition.
Yaeger cites passages from a poem by the American poet Mary
Oliver in which a “she-bear,” who stands in for the female writer,
steals honey to illustrate “the seriously playful, emancipatory

46
strategies that women writers have invented to challenge the
tradition.” She comments: “In Oliver’s ‘Happiness’ we meditate
upon the female poet’s good appetite; her possession of language
is equated with the possession of a delicious excess of meaning
that is forbidden, but therefore twice delicious. Once found it
lightens the speaker’s clamorous burden of feeling.” While
Rossetti’s forbidden fruits with their “delicious excess” of sexual,
economic, religious, and intertextual meanings offer an excellent
analogy to Yaeger’s allegory, Yaeger’s treatment of appropriation
is much more idealized than Rossetti’s:

The scenes that Mary Oliver depicts in her poem are such scenes
of theft: we may recall Derrida’s insistence that the “letter,
inscribed or propounded speech, is always stolen.... It never
belongs to its author or to its addressee.” Oliver reproduces the
female writer’s pleasure in discovering this ownerlessness, in
lightening the fictions that weigh her down, in stealing and
incorporating the languages that, until she claimed them, did not
belong to her.

Although the letter may always be stolen, this does not mean that
the female writer sees it as “ownerless.” Part of her difficulty in
negotiating with a male literary tradition is that poetic language,
even though it may always be without an ultimate author or
owner, seems very much a male property, although this can also
increase her pleasure in stealing. Yaeger tends to simplify the
difficulties of theft, but she does usefully note that “male
language” can also be represented by women as a poison, as
dangerous. She cites Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillières, but we
might also think of those fruits “like honey to the throat / But
poison in the blood” (554–55). Yaeger picks up this last reference
in her own treatment of Goblin Market, but her discussion of the
poem is surprisingly brief and marred by the fact that she
confuses Lizzie with Laura. She uses the poem as a personal
allegory of the dangers and pleasures experienced by the woman
critic drawing upon male theory: “I would like to argue, as Laura
implicitly does, that this gathering of male texts can also
represent a feminist harvest.” While this is true, Yaeger misses
the opportunity of seeing the whole poem as a commentary on

47
women’s dangerous yet necessary relation to the male literary
tradition.
Rossetti’s poem reveals that women cannot enter this tradition
on the same footing as men, any more than they can compete
with men on equal terms in the mid-Victorian marketplace. Yet
it also suggests that female interaction with the male tradition,
however complicated and risky, is inevitable. Although the
goblins are presented as dangerous creatures to be outwitted and
escaped, they also give this poem its motivating energy. In other
words, the goblins and the need to conquer them are necessary,
as the poem charts a typical path from innocence to experience.
The goblin fruits are also the fruits of experience, but Rossetti
shows women learning to control that experience in order to
maintain their own fruitfulness. (One thinks of another of her
poems, “An Apple Gathering,” which warns against the risk of
picking flowers too early and thus losing the chance of fruit.)
Women poets need to develop different strategies to avoid being
overpowered by male influence to the extent that they can no
longer write poems of their own. Trying to buy the goblins’ fruit,
Laura compromises herself by giving away part of her female
identity—her golden curl. When she subsequently dines on the
goblins’ fruit; she loses all taste for her home-produced food, and
from this we might infer that an exclusive diet of male texts
seems to starve the female literary imagination. But Lizzie, like a
woman poet who realizes she cannot simply buy into the male
tradition, is resistant to the blandishments of the goblins,
refusing to swallow their sales pitch. Rossetti’s depiction of
goblin aggression writes in what is missing from Gilbert and
Gubar’s account, as the woman struggles with or resists her male
precursors. Resistance means that Lizzie obtains the fruit-juice
surreptitiously without paying for it; she steals rather than buys.
Following her own intuition she knows that if she takes away the
juice on rather than in her body, she can transform it into
something of her own—“my juices” (468). Like many readers,
the Victorian poet Alice Meynell was puzzled by the different
effects of the fruit juice, writing that “we miss any perceptible
reason why the goblin fruits should be deadly at one time and
restorative at another.” But in a poem that is all about sources,

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context becomes all important. Given by the goblin men, the
fruit juice is like a poison, but mediated by a loving, sister, sucked
from a woman’s body, it becomes a restorative antidote.
—Catherine Maxwell. “Tasting the ‘Fruit Forbidden.’ ” The
Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts,
eds. Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen
Kooistra. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999: 80–85.

RICHARD MENKE ON THE MATERIALITY OF THE POEM

[Richard Menke is an Assistant Professor in the

Department of English at the University of Georgia. He
has also written articles on Henry James and George Eliot.]

If more than a century of critical response is any guide, Christina

Rossetti’s Goblin Market would seem to remain as delicious and
mystifying as the goblin fruit it describes. In response to the
speculations it provoked, Rossetti herself claimed that the poem
was only a fairy story, utterly without “any profound or ulterior
meaning,” but notwithstanding her pronouncement, Goblin
Market has remained the subject of innumerable interpretations,
especially religious, psychological, and biographical ones. Artless
children’s story or sophisticated allegory, unconscious fantasy or
carefully crafted fable, Goblin Market does in fact possess the
texture of a fairy tale, with its singsong repetitions, its mingling
of the mundane with the outré, its curious mixture of
otherworldliness and acute materiality. Indeed, this materiality is
one of its most memorable and attractive, even seductive,
qualities. I wish to consider the materiality of the poem,
especially as it centers around representations of fruit as physical
object and commodity, and to offer a reading of the poem that
brings Rossetti’s so-called “aesthetics of renunciation” into line
with what I consider her sharp but subtle economic critique—
that is, to read Rossetti’s renunciatory poetics alongside Victorian
political economy, the “science of wealth” that is “simultaneously
the science ... of want, of thrift, of saving,” of “asceticism” and
“[s]elf-denial”: the science of renunciation.

49
 Terrence Holt has complained that most contemporary
readings of Goblin Market emphasize “the goblins, and the issues
of sexuality and gender they seem to represent,” at the expense of
“the market,” but recently several accounts of the poem have
attempted to redress the situation. Holt himself discusses Goblin
Market in terms of the various patterns of exchange—linguistic,
psychological, economic, and sexual—that structure it. Elizabeth
Campbell draws upon the work of Julia Kristeva to examine the
interaction of gender and market relations in the poem’s contrast
between male linearity and female cyclicality. Working from
Nancy Armstrong’s claim that “the 1860s represent a new
moment in the history of desire in which consumer culture
changed the nature of middle-class femininity,” Mary Wilson
Carpenter considers the double way in which the poem treats
women’s bodies as “consumable,” that is, both as able to be
consumed and destroyed by men, and as sustaining and life-
generating. By focusing on the shadow figure of the prostitute,
Elizabeth K. Helsinger explores Goblin Market’s treatment of the
relationship between women and the marketplace, and incisively
questions the poem’s ultimate utopian solution to the problems
this relationship presents. But if Goblin Market is indeed a poem
about consumers and markets, what might goblin fruit—its
central representation of the consumable and marketable—mean?
The OED traces the movement of the word fruit through its
centuries of use in English: from its core meaning of physical
botanical product, to its biblically inflected extension into
metaphor (“the fruit of the righteous is a tree of life,” “the fruit
of the womb”), and finally to a point where the metaphorical
again becomes material (fruit as the result of labor, fruit as
financial profit). In a curious way, the motion of Goblin Market
itself parallels and reiterates the movement of fruit, its drift from
the physical to the metaphorical and back to the physical, and
does so, I argue, largely through the lavishly described yet always
mysterious “goblin fruit” itself. Inspired first of all by the long
list that foregrounds the goblin fruit, and even the words used to
represent the fruit, as sensuous and firmly particular, the first
sections of this essay consider the fruit of the goblin market as
fruit in the mid-Victorian market. My emphasis then shifts to the

50
metaphorical or metonymic meanings of the goblin fruit,
especially in terms of dominant Victorian political economy and
John Ruskin’s attempts to rewrite economics along aesthetic and
ethical lines. Finally, the essay attempts to re-materialize the fruit
in order to interrogate its imaginary status as the realization of
that abstract concept, a “commodity,” and by doing so, to
recapture the poem’s critical power—and to recognize its crucial
equivocations.

UNSEASONABLE FROSTS

Such a reading of Goblin Market must begin by defining the site

of the poem’s production, locating it not merely discursively but
also spatially and temporally, finding its starting point before
tracing its trajectory. Indeed, this site seems intriguingly
antithetical to the imaginary setting of the poem. In place of a
picture-book countryside we have London (in which Christina
Rossetti spent most of her life, and about which she wrote few of
her poems); in place of fairy-tale timelessness, a particular year
and even a specific day: April 27, 1859, the date written on the
manuscript.
It was an unusual spring in England, to say the least, and one
that had followed an unusual winter. An 1859 article in Turner
and Spencer’s Florist, Fruitist and Garden Miscellany compares the
mild English winter just past to one in “the south of Italy.” In the
wake of such a warm season, Christina Rossetti might well have
anticipated that the coming spring would be a green and pleasant
one. If she did, she must have been terribly disappointed, for
after this uncommonly gentle winter, the “extraordinary
vicissitudes” of English weather soon proved disastrous to the
trees and flowers she loved and wrote about. In fact, these
vicissitudes seem exceptionally likely to have decisively affected
the composition, possibly even the original conception, of Goblin
Market. The Florist’s writer continues:

Very early in February a number of shrubs were fast breaking into

leaf, and Apricots opening their blooms; during March all went
on unchecked, so much so, that ... the woodlands and pasture

51
 grounds presented all the appearances usually shown by the first
week in May, and every description of garden produce partook
also of the general earliness of the season.

But these early blossoms and fruit, like Jeanie’s “gay prime” in
Goblin Market—and almost like Laura’s “early prime”—come to
an end when a frost brings premature destruction (316, 549):

On the 31st of March we had 10º of frost, which, following after

a snow the previous evening, did a vast amount of mischief to such
fruit trees in bloom, besides destroying, in several places the crops
of Apricots, which were then of considerable size. Peaches had
partly set, and suffered more or less throughout the country; and
early Pears and Plums also.

Even at this point, one gardener notes the many plants lost and
the “fruit trees shorn of promising crops.” But the unusual
conditions continue:

The weather became warmer, and the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th of
April were remarkable for their great heat, the day temperature
having been 82º in this neighborhood on the 7th, and between 70º
and 80º the greater part of the former three days, an extraordinary
temperature for the first week of April.... The weather next
became sensibly colder, and on the 14th and following days
indications of winter made their appearance, followed by snow
storms, cold north-west winds, and frosty nights. On the morning
of the l0th we had 8º of frost, accompanied by an easterly wind;
this frost has almost completed the ruin of our crops of Pears,
Plums, and Cherries, excepting perhaps those in some favored
locality, or which had ample protection, things almost impossible
to effect within the means of an ordinary garden expenditure, to
say nothing of orchards and open garden fruits.

Another writer notes the results of this “most disastrous” frost in

more detail:

Apricots were a most abundant crop on the walls, and as large as

Damsons. On trees unprotected, or protected only with nets,
every fruit is destroyed; on trees protected with tiffany, even

52
 double, some few are left, perhaps one in 1000, but these,
although green and apparently sound, have their kernels brown
and dead. Peaches and Nectarines under the same circumstances
seem all destroyed; they had set an immense crop. I never
remember them blooming more kindly or setting their fruit
better, owing to their shoots being so well ripened by the warmth
of the summer and autumn last year. Some few kinds of Plum
were in full bloom ... the germs of all the expanded blossoms are
destroyed.... Pear trees here had not unfolded their blossoms, but
they seem to have suffered much.

After the abundant harvests and well-supplied fruit market of

the preceding seasons, in the spring of 1859 Britain seemed
likely to grow precious little fruit in the coming season. One
gardener in Lincolnshire reports the loss of all his peaches, and
many of his gooseberries, currants, pears, and both early and
late apples. A Yorkshire correspondent to the Gardeners’
Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette notes the widespread
lamentation over the recent weather’s effect on the British fruit
crop: “Expectations of abundant crops are blighted, and now the
cry is that the severe frosts of the last two days of March and the
greater part of April have all but destroyed our fruit.” No doubt,
nearly everyone in England in the spring of 1859 would have
been painfully conscious of the extremely intemperate weather
between the end of March and late April, but further awareness
of the resulting state of British fruit was hardly restricted to a
handful of disappointed fruiterers writing in horticultural
magazines. The Economist’s weekly account of foreign goods on
the British market outlines the increasing scarcity of lemons and
oranges, some of the most popular varieties of fruit for
importation, from the end of March to the end of April. On
April 23 it reports a “[m]arket bare of oranges,” a week later one
emptied not only of oranges but now also of lemons. By May 7,
the “backward season for fruit of home growth” seemed “likely
to clear the market of foreign produce” as well, as Britons
substituted imported for homegrown fruit. Anyone in England
who sought a sweet orange to eat or wanted a lemon for punch
would very likely have had to do without. Given the destruction
of the new fruit crop and the subsequent scarcity of imported

53
fruit, England in late April 1859 must have been a particularly
fruit-less place.
According to the manuscript of Goblin Market, Christina
Rossetti completed the poem or at least wrote out this most
important draft on April 27, 1859. Even if the unhappy situation
of British horticulture and the fruit trade did not positively
determine the representation of the conspicuously plentiful and
luscious fruit in Goblin Market, it cannot help but have informed
it. In place of a “renunciatory aesthetics” that simply and
unquestioningly spurns present pleasures, here perhaps is a
poetics that takes genuine enjoyment in displacing absence, or at
least one acutely sensitive to the dynamic relationships between
desire and constraint, pleasure and imagination. The fulfillment
of such desires, the realization of such pleasures, may depend on
the consumption of goods, but poetic imagination may provide a
substitute—or may make the ache of desire more acute. If the
inventory of fruit in Goblin Market seems dreamlike in its intense
physicality, the reasons for this paradox may in fact be
legitimately historical: at the time the poem was written, fresh
fruit would indeed have been largely the stuff of fantasy. In the
context of a real market barren of lemons or oranges, of orchards
with apricots, pears, peaches, and cherries dead on the boughs,
how great must have been the sheer extravagance, and perhaps
the level of denial, involved in producing such a fantastic
catalogue. Or how great must have been the power of such a call
as the goblin men incessantly make to their prospective
customers. “Morning and evening / Maids heard the goblins
cry,” begins Goblin Market (1–2). The poem then proceeds to
mimic its goblins by articulating their cry, a marvelously
encyclopedic and paratactic call that includes twenty-nine kinds
of fruit in twenty-nine lines:

“Come buy our orchard fruits,

Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,

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 Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;—
All ripe together
In summer weather,—
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy:
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
Come buy, come buy.” (3–31)

“Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,” “Figs to fill your mouth”—

it certainly seems a list to fill one’s mouth, exquisitely “sweet to
tongue and sound to eye”; simply to read the list aloud is almost
to “taste them and try.” In another poet, in another poem, the
effect of the cry’s penultimate line might be to give a whiff of
synaesthesia, mere sensory shift. But here, language and food,
sight and taste, the visual and the auditory and the physical
(“sound to eye”) all begin to merge. The combination will soon
prove dangerous to Laura, for whom “a peep at goblin men”
seems almost automatically to entail trafficking with them and
consuming their fruit (49). The power of the fruit and the power
of the merchants’ language overlap in this visionary introductory
catalogue. And in its sheer profusion, the list works at least
temporarily to keep things in the realm of the material, to
“overload the senses and ... impair the observer’s ability to see
beyond the physical.”

55
 —Richard Menke. “The Political Economy of Fruit.” The Culture
of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, eds. Mary
Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra.
Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999: 105-111.

LORRAINE JANZEN KOOISTRA ON THE POETIC FANTASY

[Lorraine Janzen Kooistra is Chair of the Department of

English at Nipissing University in Ontario, Canada. Her
recent publications include Christina Rossetti and Illustration:
A Publishing History and The Culture of Christina Rossetti:
Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, co-edited with Mary
Arseneau and Antony H. Harrison.]

Christina Rossetti’s best-known poetic fantasy, Goblin Market, is a

work of immense visual power, employing a figural language both
richly evocative and suggestively vague. With its mixture of the
erotic and the religious, the social and the moral, the childlike and
the profound, Goblin Market has always been a potent inspiration
for illustrators. From 1862 to the present, Goblin Market has
sparked the imaginations of at least eighteen artists, each of whom
has responded to the poem’s intriguing indeterminacies with
pictorial representations designed to fix Rossetti’s fantastic subject
by reifying her metaphors. These illustrated editions offer us a
range of “visual ‘positions’ ” for Rossetti’s fantasy in cultural
contexts extending from the Pre-Raphaelite to the postmodern.
The interaction between Rossetti’s Victorian text and the images
that have been produced to accompany it provides a fruitful study
in cultural poetics, for visual depiction, as Gordon Fyfe and John
Law observe, “is never just an illustration.... [I]t is the site for the
construction and depiction of social difference. To understand a
visualisation is thus to inquire into its provenance and into the
social work that it does ... to note its principles of exclusion and
inclusion, to detect the roles that it makes available, to understand
the way in which they are distributed, and to decode the
hierarchies and differences that it naturalises. And it is also to
analyse the ways in which authorship is constructed or concealed
and the sense of audience is realised.”

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 Illustrations have the power to visualize Rossetti’s poetic
fantasy for a variety of audiences in a range of historical times
and places. The implications of this power extend well beyond a
single poem’s history of production and reception to include the
larger question of the role of visual culture in identity formation
generally; as W.J.T. Mitchell demonstrates in Picture Theory, “the
tensions between visual and verbal representations are
inseparable from struggles in cultural politics and political
culture.” Thus, in order to understand the “social work”
performed by illustration, it is indeed necessary, as Fyfe and Law
suggest, to interrogate the ways in which roles are constructed,
hierarchies and differences established, and audiences realized.
My focus in this study of Goblin Market’s cultural production
from the mid-nineteenth century to the present is on the ways in
which feminine subjectivity has been visualized in contexts
ranging from fine art books to children’s picture books to
pornographic magazines. “What is at stake” here, as Rosemary
Betterton argues in Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual
Arts and Media, “is the power of images to produce and to define
the feminine in specific ways.” Indeed, visual culture demands
investigation because it is one of the “defining and regulatory
practice[s]” by which sexualities are represented, produced,
mediated, and transformed. In a work such as Goblin Market,
whose subject matter turns on the pleasures and transgressions of
looking as they relate to the formation of female subjectivity and
identity, pictures of women and goblins present spectacles of
fantasy and femininity that are neither passive nor innocent.
Rather, they have the power to compete with the text for the
dominant representation of the story. By visualizing metaphor,
artists construct critical lenses through which readers view
Rossetti’s fantasy. Thus image and text are engaged in a dialogue
in which two ways of looking at femininity, and two ways of
encoding that vision, are presented to the reader. The dialogic
relations between picture and word enact a struggle between
spectatorship and spectacle which mirrors Goblin Market’s own
engagement with the conflicting (and conflicted) positions of
looking and being looked at.
In illustrated versions of Goblin Market the identity of the

57
subject is constructed along a split axis of visual and verbal
images in a way that parallels bath the conflicted consciousness
of Rossetti herself and the split subjectivity of her female
subjects, Lizzie and Laura. As feminists from Simone de
Beauvoir onward have noted, feminine subjectivity entails a
divided consciousness: a woman is simultaneously aware of her
self as an independent ego and her self as object. A woman’s
awareness of her self as “Other” is constructed both through the
gaze of the male subject who has the power to perceive and
manipulate objects, and through the reciprocal, coopted consent
of the woman who “must pretend to be an object.” Following
feminist theories of the gaze, Dolores Rosenblum has written
powerfully about Rossetti’s own double awareness of herself as
active creative agent and passive artistic model, noting that in
Goblin Market Rossetti overcomes “the dualism between the
‘active’ see-er and the ‘passive’ seen” to the extent that “the
model transcends the artist, and the spectacle for all eyes
becomes the witness” of Lizzie’s restorative actions of watching
and rescuing. The transcendence Rosenblum assigns to Rossetti’s
text, however, is part of the poet’s utopian fable, and is limited to
her own production of the poem as verbal narrative. When her
text is reproduced in illustrated editions, the poet loses authorial
control, and the fantasy becomes a collaborative enterprise—a
cultural commodity whose production and reception are
determined by the imaginative vision of artists and the audiences
for whom their images are constructed.
Rossetti’s poem contests the traditional paradigm whereby
“pleasure in looking ... [is] split between active/male and
passive/female” with her recuperation and celebration of not
only the female spectator, but also the redemptive function of
woman as spectacle. However, many of the visual images that
have been produced to illustrate Goblin Market’s themes have
offered the more familiar story of feminine subjectivity in
relation to visual pleasure. Some of these visualizations redirect
the subversive energy of the poem by representing Lizzie and
Laura as passive objects of the gaze; others comment critically on
the text by providing images of female resistance and struggle; all
construct the feminine when they compose their fantastic

58
subjects. If Rossetti’s poem asserts the need for women to be
engaged with their world as lookers and doers, the illustrations
have the power to transform these active female heroes into
objects to be looked at, still images of beautiful otherness.
Readers of illustrated Goblin Markets are thus frequently faced
with two ways of looking at the same story, and their reading of
Rossetti’s narrative is mediated by the dialogue between the
poetic fantasy and the visual object. For this reason, I will begin
by examining the text’s attitude to looking before moving on to
investigate the ways in which Rossetti’s fantasy has been offered
to the gaze of its readers in illustrated editions.

LOOKING AT ROSSETTI’S POETIC FANTASY

Goblin Market is a poem that turns on women’s relation to

looking and being looked at. Rossetti’s initial title for the poem—
“A Peep at the Goblins”—focuses on its scopophilic themes.
While at first blush the word “peep” may evoke the innocent
playfulness of her cousin Eliza Bray’s A Peep at the Pixies, in the
context of the narrative itself “peep” becomes overlaid with the
connotations of furtive looking, stolen glances at the forbidden,
clandestine curiosity. Both the feminine desire to look at the
world and the prohibitions against it are established in the sisters’
opening speeches. “We must not look at goblin men,” says
Laura, even as she is “pricking up her golden head” to get a
better view. “You should not peep at goblin men,” replies Lizzie,
as she “cover[s] up her eyes, / ... lest they should look.”
Throughout the first half of the poem, Laura maintains her
curiosity—her desire to see and experience—while Lizzie keeps
her eyes deliberately closed to the wonders of the world: Laura
“stare[s],” but Lizzie “dare[s] not look” (105, 243). The goblins
and their luscious fruit become objects of Laura’s gaze, sensuous
emblems of her desire. She succumbs to temptation first because
of what she sees and imagines and only secondarily because of
what she tastes. When she can no longer hear the goblins’ cries
and is prohibited from buying more fruit, her first reaction is to
feel “blind,” not hungry (259). Her “sunk eyes” mirror her
wasting subjectivity as she begins to see false mirages of her

59
desire (288–92). At last Lizzie, who “watch[es] her sister’s
cankerous care” (300), becomes impelled to action, leaves her
cottage for the haunted glen, “And for the first time in her life /
[Begins] to listen and look” (327–28).
Venturing into the outside world means that Lizzie becomes a
spectacle as well as a spectator: the goblins “spy” her at the very
moment that she begins her furtive “peeping” (330) and
immediately begin their visual seduction as they hold up dishes
laden with fruit: “Look at our apples,” they tell her, describing
their wares in beautiful detail (352–62). Unlike Laura, however,
Lizzie looks without succumbing to temptation; for her, the
goblins and their fruits are not objects of desire, but means to an
end. With her clear-sighted vision, Lizzie is able to recognize, as
Laura was not, that the goblins’ “looks were evil” (397). Thus,
although the goblins viciously pummel her with their fruit,
Lizzie resists them and triumphantly brigs home the restorative
juices in syrupy streaks upon her face. When Laura kisses her,
tastes the goblin juices, and falls into a fit that looks like death,
Lizzie watches over her until Laura revives at dawn with her eyes
clear and full of light, ready to see the world in new ways and to
picture her experience for others in the language of story.
One of the lessons of Goblin Market is the visual/spiritual one
of learning how to look and interpret correctly—to know that
what seems fair may be foul: attractive goblin men betray;
delectable fruits poison. This is certainly the lesson that Laura
learns, and the one she passes on to the children at the end of the
narrative. But Lizzie, too, learns something. She learns that a
woman cannot live in the world without looking and being
looked at. And she learns that, while these activities are
paradoxically both destructive and redemptive, they are also
essential to life, to love, to creativity. As a result of Lizzie’s
actions, Laura regains control over her selfhood; the sisters’
relationship achieves a more intense level of love through their
painfully acquired knowledge and power; and their experience is
affirmed through the continuity of children and storytelling. In
the course of their goblin encounters, Lizzie and Laura learn to
look at themselves and each other in new ways, and to formulate
alternate visions of female subjectivity.

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 Similarly, Rossetti invites her readers to contemplate the ways
in which her hero, Lizzie, has the power to be both spectator and
spectacle without forfeiting her individual subjectivity. In
Christian terms, she can be “in the world but not of it”; in
feminist terms, she can see men looking at her without becoming
alienated from her own selfhood. In this way, the dynamics of
looking in Goblin Market radically challenge the binary
opposition between active male “see-er” and passive female
“seen.” Rossetti’s fantasy posits a world in which women can take
pleasure in looking and survive the ordeals of being looked at to
emerge triumphant as storytellers who deliberately display
themselves to the gaze of others as part of an exemplary
spectacle—a redemptive image of feminine power and Christian
virtue to be seen, understood, and imitated. Such a spectacle
takes on special significance if we imagine Rossetti’s ideal
audience to be, as Jan Marsh posits, the girls and sisters at the
Highgate Penitentiary for Fallen Women, where Rossetti was
working as a lay sister when she wrote her poem.
Goblin Market is one of the many Victorian fairy tales whose
alternate visions staged a social protest against the status quo by
expressing a utopian desire for a better world. As Jack Zipes’s
groundbreaking work in the field suggests, these utopian tales
had a characteristically “feminine, if not feminist” slant, not only
because of their strong female protagonists, but also because of
their emphatic suggestion “that utopia will not be just another
men’s world.” The feminism of these fantasies—and Zipes
specifically cites Goblin Market in this instance—involves “an
intense quest for the female self.” Many other readers of Goblin
Market have seen precisely this kind of quest in the poem. Yet at
the same time that Rossetti struggled to envision a female
subjectivity encompassing action, desire, knowledge, and power,
she was also constrained by the conventions of Victorian society,
which constructed the feminine as passive, innocent, beautiful,
and helpless. These were certainly the feminine virtues Rossetti
herself conveyed when she modeled for the mother of God in
two of her brother Gabriel’s early works, The Girlhood of Mary
Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini. As Rosenblum points out,
Rossetti’s dual experience as artist and model produced a split

61
consciousness that is enacted in her poetry itself in “a range of
seeing acts and visual ‘positions.’ ” In trying to envision new ways
of looking at women in Goblin Market, Rossetti both exploits and
subverts the notion that women are objects of the gaze. Drawing
on a religious rather than a carnal iconic tradition, Rossetti
attempts to revision femininity by offering the story of Laura and
Lizzie as an exemplary spectacle of strong and active
womanhood.
—Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. “Visualizing the Fantastic Subject”:
Goblin Market and the Gaze. The Culture of Christina Rossetti:
Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, eds. Mary Arseneau, Antony
H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1999: 137–142.

JEROME J. MCGANN ON RELIGIOUS ALLEGORY

[Jerome J. McGann is the John Stewart Bryan Professor at
the University of Virginia and the Thomas Holloway
Adjunct Professor at Royal Holloway College, the
University of London. His publications include Dante
Gabriel Rossetti: The Collected Works and Byron and
Romanticism.]
‘Goblin Market’ is Rossetti’s most famous poem, and certainly
one of her masterpieces. The point hardly needs argument, for
no one has ever questioned its achievement and mastery. What
does need to be shown more clearly is the typicalness of ‘Goblin
Market’ in Rossetti’s canon—indeed, its centrality.
Though Rossetti herself declared that the work was not
symbolic or allegorical, her disclaimer has never been accepted,
and interpretations of its hidden or ‘secret’ meaning have been
made from the earliest reviews. Everyone agrees that the poem
contains the story of temptation, fall, and redemption, and some
go so far as to say that the work is fundamentally a Christian
allegory. Nor is there any question that the machinery of such an
allegory is a conscious part of the work. ‘Goblin Market’
repeatedly alludes to the story of the fall in Eden, and when
Lizzie, at the climax, returns home to ‘save’ her sister, the poem
represents the event as a Eucharistic emblem (see especially lines

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471–2). Other, less totalizing Christian topoi and references
abound. The important ‘kernel stone’ (line 138) which Laura
saves from the fruit she eats, and which she later plants
unavailingly (lines 281–92), is a small symbolic item based upon
the New Testament parable (see Matthew 7:15–20) about the
fruit of bad trees; indeed, the entire symbology of the fruits is
Biblical, just as the figures of the merchant men are developed
out of texts in the book of Revelation (18:11–17).
Rossetti draws from this passage her poem’s controlling ideas
of the evil merchants as traffickers in corruption and of their
fruits as deceptive and insubstantial. Consequently, an important
key for interpreting the poem proves to be her own
commentaries on the Revelation text. The commentary on verse
14 has a manifest relevance which can pass without further
remark:

14. And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and
all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and
thou shall find them no more at all.

Or according to the Revised Version: ‘And the fruits which thy

soul lusted after are gone from thee, and all things that were
dainty and sumptuous are perished from thee, and men shall find
them no more at all’:—reminding us of St. Paul’s words to the
Colossians: ‘... The rudiments of the world ... (Touch not; taste
not; handle not; which all are to perish with the using)’.
As regards the second clause of the doom (in this verse), the two
Versions suggest each its own sense. The Authorized, as if those
objects of desire may have been not destroyed but withdrawn
whilst the craving remains insatiable. According to both texts the
loss appears absolute, final, irreparable; but (collating the two)
that which departs instead of perishing leaves behind it in addition
to the agony of loss the hankering, corroding misery of absence.
(Deep, 421)

Her commentaries on verses 15–17 are equally pertinent. There

the sacred text speaks of the coming desolation of Babylon, the
merchant’s city; Rossetti says of this event that, though it has not
yet come to pass, it ‘must one day be seen. Meanwhile we have
known preludes, rehearsals, foretastes of such as this’, and the

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thought leads her to her ‘lamentation’. In this she cries ‘alas’ for
those traditional political symbols of corruption (Sodom or Tyre,
for example), but her lament builds to an interesting climax: ‘Alas
England full of luxuries and thronged by stinted poor, whose
merchants are princes and whose dealings crooked, whose
packed storehouses stand amid bare homes, whose gorgeous
array has rags for neighbours!’ (Deep, 422). Of course, Rossetti
was no Christian Socialist (or even a Muscular Christian), and
her chief concern here is not with the material plight of the
socially exploited. Rather, she focuses on the material condition
as a sign, or revelation, of an inward and spiritual corruption—
Babylon, Tyre, Sodom, England—as in Tennyson and T.S. Eliot,
these are all, spiritually, one city (‘Unreal city’), the passing
historical agencies of the recurrent reality of a spiritual
corruption.
The Bible, both the Old and New Testaments,
characteristically associates these ‘Babylonian’ corruptions with
sensuality and sexual indulgence, and Rossetti uses this
association in her poem. The goblin merchants tempt the two
sisters with fruits that offer unknown pleasures, more particularly,
with fruits that promise to satisfy their unfulfilled desires. The
figure of Jenny is introduced into the poem partly to make plain
the specifically sexual nature of the temptation and partly to show
that the issues are intimately related to the middle-class ideology
of love and marriage. Jenny’s is the story of the fallen woman.
In this context, the final (married) state of the sisters might
easily be seen as sanctioning the institution of marriage as the
good woman’s just reward. To a degree this is indeed the case; but
‘Goblin Market’ presents the marriages of Laura and Lizzie in
such an oblique and peripheral way that the ideology of the
marriage-as-reward is hardly noticed and is conspicuously
deemphasized by the poem. The only men present in the story
are the goblins, and Laura and Lizzie’s emotional investments are
positively directed toward women and children only. In fact, the
poem’s conclusion suggests that the sisters have made (as, it were)
‘marriages of convenience’, only, in ‘Goblin Market’, that
concept has been completely feminized. It is as if all men had
been banished from this world so that the iniquity of the fathers

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might not be passed on to the children. Hence we see why the
only men in the story are goblin men: the narrative means to
suggest, indirectly, that the men of the world have become these
merchants and are appropriately represented as goblins.
The ultimate evil of the goblin merchants is that they tempt
to betray, promise but do not fulfil. Indeed, they do not merely
fail in their promises, they punish the women who accept these
promises as true. Yet the power of their temptations does not
come from the inherent resources of the goblins; it comes from
the frustration of the women, which is represented in Laura’s
(and Jenny’s) longings and curiosity. The goblins, therefore,
tempt the women at their most vulnerable point, which turns out
to be, however, the place of their greatest strength as well.
Here we approach the centre of the poem’s meaning, the core
of its paradoxical symbolism. The temptation of the goblins
always turns to ashes and emptiness because it does not satisfy
the women’s fundamental desires (see Rossetti’s commentary on
Revelation 18:14 above). But in terms of the Christian allegory,
this simply means that the goblins offer ‘passing shows’ to match
what in the women are ‘immortal longings’. Notice how tenderly
Laura and Lizzie are presented together immediately after
Laura’s ‘fall’; how she finally emerges from her experience
completely unstained; how the poem turns aside, at all points,
any negative moral judgement of her character; and how it does
not read Laura’s condition as a sign of her evil. Rather, Laura’s
suffering and unhappiness become, in the poem, a stimulus for
feelings of sympathy (in the reader) and for acts of love (by
Lizzie). These aspects of the poem show that, for Rossetti, the
‘temptation and fall’ do not reveal Laura’s corruption but rather
the nature of her ultimate commitments and desires, which are
not—despite appearances, and were she herself only aware of
it—truly directed toward goblin merchants and their fruits.
Laura’s desires (they are ‘Promethean’ in the Romantic sense
and tradition) are fulfilled in the poem twice. The first fulfilment
is in the notorious passage at 464–74, which is as patently erotic
and sensual in content as it is Eucharistic in form. The
significance of this elemental tension becomes clear when we
understand that the scene introduces a negative fulfilment into

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the work: Laura is released from the spell of erotic illusions
(‘That juice was wormwood to her tongue, / She loathed the
feast’ [lines 494–5]) and permitted to glimpse, self-consciously,
the truth which she pursued in its illusive form:

Laura started from her chair,

Flung her arms up in the air,
Clutched her hair:
‘Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted
For my sake the fruit forbidden?
Must your light like mine be hidden,
Your young life like mine be wasted,
Undone in mine undoing
And ruined in my ruin,
Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?’—
She clung about her sister,
Kissed and kissed and kissed her:
Tears once again
Refreshed her shrunken eyes,
Dropping like rain
After long sultry drouth;
Shaking with anguish, fear, and pain,
She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.
(‘Goblin Market’, lines 475–92)

This passage anticipates the poem’s conclusion—the second,

positive scene of fulfilment—where Laura tells the children the
story of a sisterly love and bids them follow its example: ‘Then
joining hands to little hands / Would bid them cling together,—
/ For there is no friend like a sister’ (lines 560–2, my emphasis).
For passion and erotics are substituted feeling and sympathy, and
for men are substituted women and children, the ‘little’ ones of
the earth.
Thus we see how the Christian and Biblical materials—the
images and concepts—serve as the metaphoric vehicles for
understanding a complex statement about certain institutionalized
patterns of social destructiveness operating in nineteenth-century
England. As in so many of her poems, ‘Goblin Market’ passes a
negative judgement upon the illusions of love and marriage. But
the poem is unusual in Rossetti’s canon in that it has developed a

66
convincing positive symbol for an alternative, uncorrupted mode
of social relations—the love of sisters.
This situation requires some further explanatory comment. In
the story of Laura and Lizzie, we can observe patterns of
conceptualization familiar from Rossetti’s other works. One
notes, for, example, that the goblins’ power over women comes
ultimately from the women’s (erroneous) belief that the goblins
have something which the women need, that the women are
incomplete. Part of the meaning of ‘Goblin Market’ is the
importance of independence, including an independence from
that erroneous belief. Lizzie’s heroic adventure on her sister’s
behalf dramatizes her integrity, her freedom from dependency
on the goblins: she is not a relative creature but is wholly herself,
and capable of maintaining herself even in the face of great
danger.
Nevertheless, the premium which Rossetti placed upon
personal integrity was always threatened by the demon of
loneliness (‘And left me old, and cold, and grey’). ‘Goblin
Market’ turns this threat aside, principally via the symbol of
sisterly love and the alternative socializing structures which that
symbol is able to suggest and foster. An important formal aspect
of the poem’s resolution depends upon our awareness that Lizzie
is not Laura’s ‘saviour’, for this would simply represent a variant
type of a dependency relationship. The true beneficiaries of the
grace issuing from the events are ‘the children’, or society at
large in its future tense.
So far as ‘Goblin Market’ tells a story of ‘redemption’, the
process is carried out in the dialectic of the acts of both Laura
and Lizzie. Laura behaves rashly, of course, but without her
precipitous act the women would have remained forever in a
condition of childlike innocence. Lizzie’s timidity is by no means
condemned, but its limitations are very clear. Laura’s disturbed
restlessness and curiosity suggest, in relation to Lizzie, an
impulse to transcend arbitrary limits. But Laura’s behaviour is
the sign of her (and her sister’s) ignorance and, therefore, of their
inability to control and direct their own actions. When Laura
‘falls’, then, her situation reveals, symbolically, the problem of
innocence in a world which already possesses the knowledge of

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good and evil. Where ravening wolves prowl about in sheep’s
clothing, the righteous must be at once innocent as the dove and
cunning as the serpent. Lizzie’s function in the poem, then, is to
repeat Laura’s history, only at so self-conscious a level that she
becomes the master of that history rather than its victim. Still, as
the story makes very clear, her knowledge and mastery are a
function, and reflex, of Laura’s ignorance and weakness. The
definitive sign of their dialectical relationship appears in the
simple fact that Laura is not finally victimized. She is only a
victim as Jesus is a victim; she is a suffering servant. In a very real
sense, therefore, the poem represents Laura as the moral
begetter of Lizzie (on the pattern of ‘The child is father of the
man’). Lizzie does not ‘save’ Laura. Both together enact a drama
which displays what moral forces have to be exerted in order, not
to be saved from evil, but simply to grow up.
Laura and Lizzie, then, share equally in the moral outcome of
the poem’s events. The fact that their names echo each other is
no accident—and who has not sometimes confused the two when
trying to distinguish them at some memorable distance? Still, it
makes a difference if one locates the poem’s principal moral
centre in Lizzie alone, as readers have always done. In fact, to
have read the poem this way is to have read it accurately (if also
incompletely); for Rossetti, as a morally self-conscious Christian
writer, encouraged such a reading, as she wanted to do—for both
personal and polemical reasons. She encouraged it because that
way of reading the poem supports a Christian rather than a
secular interpretation of the theme of independence. All readers
of the poem will recognize its polemic against the women’s
dependence upon the lures of the goblin men; but from a
Christian viewpoint, this polemic is based upon the idea that
people should not put their trust in mortal things or persons, that
only God and the ways of God are true, real, and dependable.
Therefore, in the affairs of this world, the Christian must learn
to be independent of the quotidian—translate, contemptus
mundi—and come to trust in the eternal. So far as Lizzie seems a
‘Christ figure’—a Eucharistic agent—‘Goblin Market’ argues for
a severe Christian attitude of this sort.
But, of course, Lizzie seems something much more—and

68
much less—than a Eucharistic emblem, as Christina Rossetti
well knew: she never placed ‘Goblin Market’ among her
‘Devotional Poems’. Consequently, because Lizzie is primarily a
‘friend’ and a ‘sister’ rather than a ‘saviour’, the poem finally
takes its stand on more secular grounds. Nevertheless, it uses the
Christian material in a most subtle and effective way: to mediate
for the audience the poem’s primary arguments about love,
marriage, sisterhood, and friendship.
In much the same way does the poem use the disarming
formal appearance of a children’s fairy story. This choice was a
stroke of real genius, for no conceivable model available to her
could have represented so well a less ‘serious’ and ‘manly’ poetic
mode. When her publisher Alexander Macmillan first read the
poem to a group of people from the Cambridge Working Men’s
Society, ‘they seemed at first to wonder whether I was making
fun of them; by degrees they got as still as death, and when I
finished there was a tremendous burst of applause.’17 All three
phases of their response were acute. ‘Goblin Market’ cultivates
the appearance of inconsequence partly to conceal its own
pretensions to a consequence far greater than most of the poetry
then being produced in more ‘serious’, customary, and
recognized quarters.
Lizzie triumphs over the goblins (lines 329–463) by
outplaying them at their own games, but one should notice that
her victory is gained in and through her correct formal
behaviour. It is the goblins who are violent, disorganized, out of
control—and impolite. She addresses them as ‘good folk’ (line
362) and says ‘thank you’ (line 383) to their insidious offers. The
goblins smirk and giggle at her apparent simple-mindedness, yet
the poem clearly represents her as enjoying an unexpressed,
superior laughter at their expense. Lizzie’s behaviour is the
equivalent, in ‘Goblin Market’, of what we spoke of earlier in
relation to ‘Winter: My Secret’ and ‘No, Thank You, John’.
Lizzie’s behaviour is also a stylistic metaphor standing for
Rossetti’s poetry, whose correct beauty judges, particularly
through its modest address, all that is pretentious and illusory.
The fruits, the language, the behaviour of the goblin merchants
are all metaphors for what Keats had earlier called ‘careless

69
hectorers in proud, bad verse’. The issues here are nicely
suggested in a brief passage immediately following Lizzie’s
victory over the goblins: ‘Lizzie went her way ... / Threaded
copse and dingle, / And heard her penny jingle / Bouncing in her
purse,— / Its bounce was music to her ear’ (lines 448, 451–4).
This is Rossetti’s sign of a true poetic power—a mere penny
which jingles like the surface of the verse. Nonsense (the original
title of ‘Winter: My Secret’) and childishness—Edward Lear,
Lewis Carroll, ‘Goblin Market’—come into a great inheritance
amid the fat and arid formulas of so much High Victorian
‘seriousness’.
But ‘Goblin Market’ gains its results in the most obliging and
diplomatic fashion. Christina Rossetti was a severe woman, and
her ironic intelligence and quick tongue were observed, and
respected, by all of her contemporaries who knew her. But so
were her modest and retiring ways. She did not cultivate the
weapons, or methods, of George Sand or even of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning. Lizzie’s behaviour with the goblins is
Rossetti’s poetic equivalent for her own life and work. What
Lizzie does—what Rossetti does in her verse generally—is not to
make a frontal assault upon her enemy, but quietly to secure his
defeat by bringing righteousness out of evil, beauty out of
ugliness. Rossetti’s model for her revisionist project appears
explicitly in her Revelation commentary cited above:

Yet on the same principle that we are bidden redeem the time
because the days are evil, Christians find ways to redeem these
other creatures despite their evil tendency. Gold and silver they
lend unto the Lord: He will pay them again. Precious stones and
pearls they dedicate to the service of His Altar. With fine linen,
purple, silk, scarlet, they invest His Sanctuary; and fragrant
‘thyine’ wood they carve delicately for its further adornment ...
Whoso has the spirit of Elijah, though his horse and chariot have
come up out of Egypt, yet shall, they receive virtue as ‘of fire’ to
forward him on his heavenward course. And this despite a horse
being but a vain thing to save a man. (Deep, 420)

Out of these convictions develop, naturally, the charming

catalogues of the goblins as well as their own temptation

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speeches; but we recognize this habit of mind most clearly in the
unspeakably beautiful litanies praising the poem’s loving sisters:

Golden head by golden head,

Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other’s wings,
They lay down in their curtained bed:
Like two blossoms on one stem,
Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow,
Like two wands of ivory
Tipped with gold for awful kings.
Moon and stars gazed in at them,
Wind sang to them lullaby,
Lumbering owls forbore to fly,
Not a bat flapped to and fro
Round their rest:
Cheek to cheek and breast to breast
Locked together in one nest.
(‘Goblin Market’, lines 184–98)

Thematically this passage is important because of its position in

the poem. Although the lines describe the evening rest of the
sisters after Laura’s encounter with the goblins, the passage does
not draw any moral distinctions between Laura and Lizzie. In the
perspective of Christina Rossetti’s poem, Laura remains
fundamentally uncorrupted. By goblin standards, she is now a
fallen woman, but the poem intervenes to prevent the reader
from accepting such a judgement.
This moral intervention occurs at the level of poetic form
and verse style. As such, it does not merely tell us of the need
for a new moral awareness, it suggests that this new awareness
cannot be an abstract idea. On the contrary, it must operate in
a concrete form appropriate to the circumstances—in this case,
within the immediate literary event of the poem itself. The
poem’s general social critique (which is abstract) appears in the
verse as a series of particular stylistic events (which are
concrete). In a wholly non-Keatsian sense then, Beauty
becomes Truth: not because the beauty of art represents a
purified alternative to worldly corruptions, but because art’s
beauty is itself a worldly event, an operating (and, in this case,

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a critical) presence which argues that human acts will always
escape, and dominate, what is corrupt.

NOTES
17. Alexander Macmillan to D.G. Rossetti, 28 Oct. 1861, quoted in The
Rossetti–Macmillan Letters, ed. Lona Mosk Packer, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1963, p. 7.
18. It is a commonplace of Rossetti criticism that her poetry is the best
expression we have of the ideas and attitudes of Tractarianism. But this is a most
misleading view (though not entirely wrong); one might rather turn to a work
such as The Christian Year for an epitome of Tractarian ideology. Rossetti’s
evangelical sympathies kept her protestantism resolute, as one can readily see in
her lifelong hostility to the revival of Marianism. Waller’s observation is very
much to the point: ‘[Rossetti’s] spiritual adviser [i.e. William Dodsworth] during
her impressionable adolescence [was an] improbable combination of High
Church activist and premillenialist preacher that would mold the peculiar
configuration of her religious sensibility’ (p. 466).

—Jerome J. McGann. “Periodization and Christina Rossetti.” The

Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and
Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985: 220–229.

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 C R I T I C A L A N A LY S I S O F

“Remember”
Christina Rossetti’s poem “Remember” opens with an
injunction, “remember me when I am gone”, and that given to a
love in the present haunts whatever joy may actually exist.
“Remember me” is both a demand for the future, and a looking
back from the future towards the past. It contains a prophetic
pronouncement that is already an anticipatory nostalgia. As
opposed to the fatherly ghost in “Hamlet”, who is come back
from the “silent land” demanding the rights of memory,
Rossetti’s speaker asks for something else: “only remember me”.
This “only” is both command to another and lament for oneself.
The speaker asks for a memory that is to “late” for “counsel” or
“prayer”, and a memory that is not “grief ”. While forgetfulness
is loosely equated with “darkness and corruption”, we soon learn
that this corruption is a species of memory, and not simply of
forgetfulness:

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

A temporary forgetfulness followed by a grief riddled and forced

remembrance is not what Rossetti intended. Such activity is only
partial, a ‘vestige of the thoughts that once I had’. In effect, the
person asking for memory is put in the position of remembering,
because it is that person imagining their own aftermath,
imagining their own future remembrance. And so, the call for
memory, if imperfect, becomes a call for a pleasant forgetfulness.
The speaker suspects their own call for memory, because their
call for memory may be ‘the thoughts that once I had’. This
posture is best glossed by the poems image of the speaker as half
turning to go, yet turning to stay. This image is offered by the

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speaker as a mutual remembrance, but simultaneously as a future
possibility. One can almost imagine the temporal speculation of
the poem rotating around the speaker, or the speaker rotating
within this network.
We begin the poem comfortably assuming that it is a
suggestion for a time after the speakers death, an assumption that
is belied by the demands the poem contains:

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Read one way, these lines sound like a lamentation. Read

another, they sound like “you will only be able to remember me
when you stop telling me of the future you have planned for us”,
with the “you” feeling more than a little accusatory. Then the
line “Only remember me” becomes more insistent, and less
forgiving. Read in this way, the poem seems to call out for a space
of pure memory, free of speculation and planning. “Only” can be
read as an impassioned cry and as a restrictive demand.
Importantly, while the poem seems to be about an event in the
future that will call for memory, it begins to feel more and more
like advice for today.
The call to remember assumes that the caller has a perfect idea
of their commemoration in mind, and in this way is very
demanding. Of course, this call also leaves a lot up to the person
who receives it, who, after all, is supposedly the one doing the
remembering. In Christina Rossetti’s poem “Remember”, the
progression seems to be: “remember me when I am gone”, “we
are alive now and the way you plan for the future, by telling me
about those plans, will resemble the way I want you to remember
when that future is no longer possible”, “an imperfect memory of
my mind and of my love, caused by a period of forgetfulness,
while dark and corrupt, is nothing to grieve about because it is
better to forget and smile than it is to remember and be sad”.

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 CRITICAL VIEWS ON

“Remember”
HAROLD BLOOM ON THE USES OF REMEMBRANCE

[In this excerpt, Professor Bloom describes the five uses of

“remember” and how Rossetti employs them in her poem.]

Her “Remember” sonnet is a superb instance of Christina

Rossetti’s hushed, understated originality. Few anticipated self-
elegies speak so adequately to a survivor in the voice of the
beloved dead. Christina’s subtle art plays upon the five uses of
“remember” in her sonnet, all of them very different from one
another. The first is simple or literal remembrance, while the
second alludes to the potential guilt of the survivor. “Only
remember me,” the third, is more plangent with regret, while
“afterwards remember” is no reproof, since grieving is
inappropriate for the respites granted by erotic loss. The final
“remember” is the most gracious, gently testifying to the selfless
element in the love that is lost.
—Harold Bloom. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina
Rossetti.” Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative
Minds. Warner Books, 2002: 432.

MARGARET REYNOLDS ON ALTERNATIVE READINGS OF

THEPOEM

[Margaret Reynolds is a Reader in the School of English

and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. She is
well known for her study of Victorian women’s poetry, and
she has also written on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Aurora Leigh.]

Listen to what she says in ‘Remember’.

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 Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad. (CP, 1:37)

The first question to ask is then: remember ... what? Of course,

the answer looks like “me.” “Remember me” is repeated three
times in the first eight lines and the title of the sonnet is often
mistakenly given as “Remember me.” But it’s a Rossetti trick. As the
poem moves on to the sestet the instruction to “remember” appears
twice, but in neither case is it made clear exactly what may, or may
not, be remembered there. Everyone knows, or feels as if they
know, this poem. It’s in all the anthologies, it’s on all the poetry
request programs. It’s popular because it’s short, neat, and has no
difficult words in it (with the possible exception of “vestige”), and
perhaps above all, because it seems to embody the romantic ideal of
self-sacrificing womanhood that is to be demanded of a poem
where the signature at the bottom relentlessly overdetermines
interpretation. Rossetti scholars fall into the trap. W. David Shaw
says that in this lyric of “barely repressed pain”

Rossetti discovers that the most exquisite and refined torture is,
not to be forgotten by her beloved, but to inflict suffering on him.
Tactful concern for the lover now displaces any self-centered
desire to live on in his memory.... “Harsh towards herself, towards
others full of ruth.” That line (5) from “A Portrait” seems to me
the best single comment on the courtesy and ease with which the
sonnet “Remember” absorbs the pain of death, turning self-
regard into an exquisitely refined contest in gentility and tact.

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Exquisite, refined, genteel, selfless, tactful; William Michael
would have recognized this Christina.
“Remember” looks like a love poem. But then that might
mean that we have already made assumptions about who is
speaking to whom that go beyond what is actually, in the text.
Apart from knowing a woman to be the author, why do we take
it that this is a woman speaking? Because, in de Beauvoir’s terms,
“He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.” The
(supposed) listener/man in this poem is obviously someone out
there in the world doing things, he is “one”; she, the
speaker/woman, is clearly “Other”—she doesn’t have an
independent existence beyond this relationship. She is anxious
that he should remember her (and she goes on about it so much
that the implication is that he won’t), so that she will exist.
The active/passive opposition set out in this poem further
implies a feminine signature. Cixous’s “Sorties” diagram lines up
activity, along with sun, culture, day, father, head, logos, with the
masculine principle while the feminine principle lines up with
passivity, moon, nature, night, mother, heart, pathos. The
ultimate passivity for women, enacted so often in Rossetti’s
poems, explicit in “After Death” and hinted at in “Remember,” is
death. Not that there’s any reason here to explain why this speaker
is about to die. The referent is absent, but presumed, because the
condition of (assumed) femininity includes the condition of
passivity and death. “The silent land” is pretty vague, and “the
darkness and corruption” not much better, but nonetheless the
idea that this speaker is about to die is quite acceptable in our
cultural positioning; women die, men mourn, it’s a classic literary
trope and one that Rossetti exploits to the full. Interestingly it’s
quite hard to turn it the other way around, because then what
would a he-speaker be dying of? going to war? There are few
possibilities. Men have to die for a reason; women just do.
So. The nice version of this poem goes: “Please remember me
when I’m dead, but on the other hand, if it’s going to make you
unhappy to remember me, then I love you so much (‘For if the
darkness and corruption leave / A vestige of the thoughts that
once I had’) that I’d rather that you did forget about me so that
you can be happy.”

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 It is true that this reading is in the poem. But it’s not the only
one. As Angela Leighton has observed, “Behind Rossetti’s
‘Aesthetic of Renunciation’ it is possible to discern an alternative
aesthetics of secrecy, self-containment, and caprice.” And the
clue to the capricious reading lies in the verbs. The first verb to
appear is the odd construction applied to the speaker, “when I am
gone away.” That the verb here is “to be” used in the present
tense to convey a future idea, and without any active verb-
construction—like “When I have gone away”—applied to the
speaker, makes the sentence feel oddly passive. By contrast in the
opening octet the listener is given active verbs lining him
(it/they/she) up with the masculine principle and making the
listener the dominant party. “When you can no more hold me by
the hand” ... so he does the holding; “I half turn to go yet turning
stay” ... so she makes a move away, but doesn’t quite manage that
bid for independence; when no more day by day / You tell me of
our future that you planned” ... our future? that you planned? ...
so she didn’t have a say in it; “It will be late to counsel then or
pray.” ... O.K., is that what he does all the time? goes on at her,
giving advice and asking her to do things?
The way these verbs work means that this speaker manages,
almost secretly, subtextually, to reveal that the he-listener is the
chief actor in their relationship. In life she, the speaker, is “use-
value.” He uses her for whatever agenda it is that he has in mind,
personal or social, and she has no say in anything. (Except, of
course, through the medium of the poem.) He acts and she is
acted upon.
Just as he acts and she is acted upon in “After Death.”
Interestingly, in both poems the same image, the same idea of
action, appears. In “Remember” the speaker looks toward the
day “When you can no more hold me by the hand.” In “After
Death” the he-presence in the poem does not “take my hand in
his.” It’s a resonant absence—or presence. The father takes the
child by the hand; the father lover takes the beloved by the hand;
patriarchy takes a hand and she is taken, wherever this père-
verted discourse is organized.
What about the pretty end then?—“if the darkness and
corruption leave / A vestige of the thoughts that, once I had.”

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What thoughts are these? Thus far, they all seem to be cross, fed-
up thoughts about how he is bullying her and lecturing her.
Maybe then these are the thoughts that will get left behind, the
traces, like fossils left on the face of the earth. And maybe the
“darkness and corruption” here is not death (as in the nice
version), but the darkness and corruption of her anger, her
distress, at his conventional use of her. No wonder then that he
should “forget and smile” because, maybe, just maybe, what is
going on here is not that she wants him to forget so that he can
be happy because she loves him so much, but that if he
remembers, and remembers the truth, then he will be sad. And
the implication is that so he should be, because he’s going to
realize what a shit he’s been all along. “Better by far” does not
sound much like a generous valedictory wish any more; it sounds
like a curse, a threat, a bitter promise that is perverse and “sweet”
and cruel in the mouth of the vengeful speaker.
Once upon a time Christina Rossetti was simple.
But Christina loved games, puns, parodies, and secrets, and
while William Michael and so many later readers have mooned
over the “broken-hearted”-ness of her poetry, Rossetti has played
a joke. Self-effacing, hidden, secret, behind, underneath, are
words that are often associated with Rossetti, yet what goes on in
that underneath, still needs excavation. The curiously throwaway
reference to an evolutionary context that appears in “Remember”
may provide a model. “Darkness and corruption” may, after all,
be the troubled present, the nineteenth century itself, the period
of Rossetti’s own lived life, fraught with personal and social
prohibitions that make indirect speaking necessary. But still in
that place a trace may be left of the individual life, a vestige of
(self ) creation. Others coming after, remembering Rossetti, will
be able to read the trace of the hidden life beneath the cover
story. Not that the one excludes the other. “After Death” and
“Remember” both have (at least) two readings. In each case a
subversive text is inscribed within a complaisant poem, but they
are simultaneously compatible.
In 1856 Christina Rossetti wrote a story about a picture called
“The Lost Titian.” It was published in, The Crayon in New York
and was later included in Rossetti’s Commonplace and Other Short

79
Stories (1870). Dante Gabriel called this collection “the most
everyday affair possible” but he misses the point. Compiling the
commonplace book, a scrapbook or family album containing
favorite quotations, recipes, autographs, and illustrations,
provided a familiar domestic occupation for Victorian women;
and scrapbooks, with all their implications for doubleness, text
and revised text, fragments reworked, were a preoccupation with
his sister. There is also a curious echo here in the title, which
Christina said she just couldn’t manage to improve. Years since,
when Dante Gabriel had shown John Ruskin Christina’s Goblin
Market, Ruskin had declared

no publisher—I am deeply grieved to know this—would take

them, so full are they of quaintness and other offences. Irregular
measure ... is the calamity of modern poetry.... Your sister should
exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre until she
can write as the public like.

Doubtless Dante Gabriel showed the letter to Christina;

doubtless the remembered it; doubtless she replied with her title.
Another Christina pun, another joke, another hidden text.
“The Lost Titian” tells the story of Gianni, a colleague and
rival of Titian’s in Renaissance Venice. Gianni is a successful and
popular painter, but his life and his methods are suspect, and his
position is threatened by Titian’s preeminence, soon to be
confirmed by the unveiling of his latest masterpiece. One night,
in an apparently friendly game of dice, Titian, drunk with wine
and success, stakes his newly created work—and Gianni wins.
Jealous of the Master’s fame, Gianni daubs over the picture with
coarse pigments, and then, on the blank surface, he paints “a
dragon flaming, clawed, preposterous.” Falling from favor and
into debt, Gianni is beset by his creditors, who are unaware of
the presence of Titian’s masterpiece, while Titian himself does
not recognize his own painting. To Gianni’s horror, the dragon is
nonetheless claimed by another creditor who takes a fancy to its
gaudy show and sets it up as an inn sign. Gianni spends the rest
of his life trying to paint a new dragon that will be accepted in
satisfactory exchange, but to no avail. So when Gianni dies, still
silent, Titian’s masterpiece remains hidden, lost forever. Or

80
“perhaps not quite lost”: “Reader, should you chance to discern
over wayside inn or metropolitan hotel a dragon pendent, or
should you find such an effigy amid the lumber of a broker’s
shop, whether it be red, green or piebald, demand it
importunately, pay for it liberally, and in the privacy of home
scrub it. It may be that from behind the dragon will emerge a fair
one, fairer than Andromeda, and that to you will appertain the
honor of yet further exalting Titian’s greatness in the eyes of a
world.”
The double texts of Rossetti’s poems are the other way round,
of course. Underneath the “fair one” with her smooth surface is
a “preposterous” dragon who nonetheless is an Andromeda
waiting to be unchained. And when that cruel-perverse-Rossetti-
dragon is revealed, it will contribute to Rossetti’s greatness:
“Reader ... in the privacy of home scrub it.” In the privacy of
“home” the “unheimlich” will be uncovered. “Uncanny” is a
word often associated with Rossetti’s poetry and it’s a right word.
As a good Victorian daughter and sister Rossetti is always at
home—“almost constantly in the same house.” And yet her
poetry is “unheimlich” because it speaks, and it says more than it
means. Rossetti wrote in secret and she wrote secrets. Not
necessarily her own, but everybody’s secrets. Her poetry is our
talking-cure. Her protagonists speak, confess, tell. In their
nightmares and their dreams they compulsively repeat the
traumas of desire and loss. Her dead women are the corpses who
have fallen (cadaver/cadere) and lost themselves in decay, but
they paradoxically project (abject/throw out/throw up) a hidden
self, a vital self, in the process. Squeezed in between, or out
between, the spaces in the text is the secret message, written “in
white ink” that seeps and oozes through the page. In Kristeva’s
terms, the semiotic speaks through, or beyond, or out of, the
symbolic. The symbolic in Rossetti is always that “excessively
neat” surface held together by the decorum of the “single
guarantee: syntax.” But “underlying the written,” and quite as
meaningful, even more powerful, is the silent speaking space,
“enigmatic and feminine ... rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to
its intelligible verbal translation ... musical, anterior to
judgement.” But you have to listen hard. At the center of both

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“After Death” and “Remember” there is a silence. In “After
Death” there “Came a deep silence” just before the speaker lets
out the second bitter text. In “Remember” the speaker projects
herself into a time when she will be gone away “into the silent
land” and her second bitter text might be remembered. But it
has, mostly, been forgotten, or rather, not heard. In the double
texts of Rossetti’s poems her “two lips” may speak together but
they may also mumble into silence.
—Margaret Reynolds. “Speaking Unlikenesses.” Textual Practice,
January 1997: 12–17.

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 C R I T I C A L A N A LY S I S O F

“A Birthday”
In this poem, the “birthday of my life” and the arrival of a lover
are said to be more or less equivalent, although the final couplet
does admit some ambiguity: “Because the birthday of my life / is
come, my love is come to me” could be read either “because the
birthday of my life has happened, now my love is come to me”,
or “the birthday of my life has finally come because my love is
come to me”. Read the first way, the birthday of the poet’s life
causes the arrival of the lover; read the second, the coming of the
lover precipitates the birthday. The events seem codependent,
and either way the marking of the passage of time is curiously
mixed with the prospect of love, a love that seems to have been
anticipated. The difference depends on whether the emotion
inspired by the birthday of one’s life and the coming of a lover
are the same, or how similar we take the events to be. The two
happenings are compared, and the poem seems aware of its own
use of comparison. Ultimately, the claim is that the poet’s heart
is “gladder” than the sum of its imagery. The monumentalizing
function of the poem’s imagery is both enlarged and reduced by
the explicitly repetitive use of comparison, an event the formality
of which is itself like the inevitably exciting redundancy of a
birthday.
Temporally, the cyclical nature of one’s birthday is compared
with the potential singular, unique arrival of a lover. Both things
are affected by the comparison. The repetitiveness of the
celebration of a birthday feels more like the birthday, and the
uniqueness of the lover’s arrival is diffused throughout the sum of
a lifetime of birthday celebrations, mixing hope and gratitude.
When we finish the poem, we realize that “the birthday of my
life” does not necessarily refer to the poet’s birthday at all, and
that she could be using it metaphorically to refer to any
happening that inspires a gladness that must be temporarily
understood.
In the first stanza, a series of similes are introduced, simply in
the first line of each couples with a slight modification in the

83
second. In each couplet, the first half sets up equivalence
between the poet’s heart and an object: “My heart is like a
singing bird”, “My heart is like an apple tree”, and “My heart is
like a rainbow shell”. The second half of each couplet alters the
radiant purity of each image, in a not so straightforward way.
The “singing bird” is in a “watered shoot”, and so our sense of
its freedom is somewhat altered. The boughs of the apple tree
are “bent with thickset fruit”, an image of potential and
fecundity, but again of a kind of restraint, or restriction that is at
its limit case. In each case, the modification of the image
produces an excess, in order to support the final claim that the
poet’s heart is “gladder than all these”.
Christina Rossetti was often mocked in print for the
exuberance displayed by the poem, and she herself said that she
could “not account” for the joy it evoked. The images in the
poem have an emblematic history. The word “halcyon” means
calm, and is taken from a bird in an ancient fable thought to
breed during the winter solstice on a nest floating in the sea. The
nest charmed the wind and waves, and it was thought that the sea
was especially calm during this period. “Vair” is a fur obtained
from squirrels of black and white coloration, and is a frequent
part of heraldic ballads. The “fleur-de-lys” is the heraldic lily that
is emblazoned on the royal arms of France.

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 CRITICAL VIEWS ON

“A Birthday”
HAROLD BLOOM ON DANTE GABRIEL AND CHRISTINA’S
INFLUENCE ON EACH OTHER

[In this excerpt, Professor Bloom demonstrates how Dante

Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti “illuminated” each
other’s creativity and work.]

Her touch is invariably very light, her voice pitched low, but
disturbingly felt. And, though very rarely, she can be ecstatic and
celebratory, and we gladly help her celebrate “A Birthday”:

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a watered shoot:
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;

Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleur-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me. (...)

Christina Rossetti, a poet of genius by any standards, remains in

many ways an enigma. An Anglo-Catholic devotional writer,
original and in some regards esoteric, she does not assimilate
easily to the methods and aims of what now regards itself as
feminist literary criticism, and which finds in her “the aesthetics
of renunciation.” The poetry of renunciation in fact need not be

85
either religious or feminine: its major exemplar was the pagan
Goethe. A pagan closer up was Christina’s remarkable older
brother, the poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose intense
erotomania provided ample provocation to his sister’s ultimate
rejection of what our culture still exalts as “romantic love.”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting may be regarded as a
question of taste; his poetry now enjoys less critical reputation
than his sister’s, but time will alter that, since the power of his
best work transcends fashion, whereas the paintings, for the
larger part, may indeed be period pieces. I bring brother and
sister together here because they illuminate each other, and the
family resemblances (and differences) of genius have their own
value and fascination. Elsewhere in this book I juxtapose the
James brothers, and two of the Brontë sisters, but neither of
these comparisons seem to me so potentially fecund as reading,
side by side, the erotic poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the
poems of his sister, in their own way sometimes erotic, but always
with a difference.
Despite some surface impressions, both Rossettis are difficult
poets. Close reading nowadays becomes more problematic: there
are few who want to (or can) teach it, and a visually oriented
generation is reluctant to learn. Christina (I will use first names
so as to stop repeating “Rossetti”) is at her strongest when she
dissolves all differences between poetry sacred and secular:

Passing away, saith the World, passing away:

Chances, beauty, and youth, sapped day by day:
Thy life never continueth in one stay.
Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey
That hath won neither laurel nor bay?
I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:
Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay
On my bosom for aye.
Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:

With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play,
Hearken what the past doth witness and say:
Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,

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 A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.
A midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day
Lo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay;
Watch thou and pray.
Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my God, passing away:

Winter passeth after the long delay:
New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,
Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven’s May.
Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray:
Arise, come away, night is past and to it is day,
My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.
Then I answered: Yea.

This was printed as the third of “Old and New Year Ditties,” but
it far surpasses the first two. One hesitates to call Christina a
mystic, another John of the Cross or Teresa, because her
obsessive emphasis, like Dante Gabriel’s, lingers always on the
Inferno of sexual love. Despite her biographers, she has largely
kept her secrets. We know little about her “love life,” an
oxymoron for most people, and particularly for her older
brother. She declined at least two marriage proposals, supposedly
from religious scruples, but I suspect her pride and independence
determined her single status, her vision of herself as a writer.
—Harold Bloom “Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti.”
Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.
Warner Books, 2002: 432–434.

LYNDA PALAZZO ON THE MEANS OF REPRESENTATION

[Lynda Palazzo teaches at The King’s School in

Macclesfield in the United Kingdom. She has recently
published Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology.]

I would like to suggest that the difficulties in interpreting such

poems as ‘A Birthday’ stem from a tacit agreement among the
majority of critics that the study of Christina Rossetti’s poetry

87
does not involve a study of the development in poetic thought of
the time. Was she, as Festa tells us, concerned exclusively with
‘the retelling of the truths which she found in her religion’?6 To
limit her poetry in this way is to ignore any theoretical
background to her composition. Yet there are very definite
indications that Rossetti was familiar with contemporary poetic
theory. W.D. Shaw’s study of her poem ‘Good Friday’ is one
demonstration of the direct or indirect influence on her of the
poetic theory of E.S. Dallas.7
If we allow a similar theoretical basis for a poem such as ‘A
Birthday’, the elements of the poem immediately fall into
place and Rossetti can be seen experimenting with aesthetic
ideas which resemble those of her brother Dante Gabriel.
Take for example a passage from Dallas’ Poetics: An Essay on
Poetry:

And every pleasure too, has a degree of its own at which it becomes
poetry, just as ice, glass and iron have each a degree at which they melt
... so certain moods of the mind, such as love and feeling generally,
contain so much imagination as to be almost always poetic.8

Here Dallas implies that the stronger, more intense an emotion,

the more it is poetic. Why not then view ‘A Birthday’ as an
experiment in the representation of an intensely ‘poetic’ sensation,
that of ‘Love’s ecstatic gratification.’9 It is the means of
representation which is being examined by Rossetti.
Let us examine the images of the first stanza. They are not
only figures ‘recalled in their natural element’10 but are each
representations of a moment of fulfilment in a sense both sensual
and sexual. The ‘singing bird’ (2.1) has found a mate and
expresses his joy in song—as the poet wishes to express hers. The
apple tree is representative of another time of fulfilment in
nature, as is the shell which simply suggests the highest
expression of fulfilment which nature has to offer in its hint of
the birth of Aphrodite.
All these images seem to be very effective. Why then are they
insufficient to portray the emotion felt? Why is the speaker’s
heart ‘gladder than all these’ (2.7)? It is because the images are
manifestations found in nature and therefore subject to time and

88
decay. Festa agrees with Lynde’s observation that the figures in
the second stanza are superior to those in the first because they
have been ‘reworked by a creative art.’11 However, far more
important in our examination of the poem is the consideration of
the second stanza as a complete image in itself, the human
response to the intensity of the emotion felt. In an attempt to
immortalise such an emotion, mankind responds with an act of
artistic creation, and here we remember Lynde’s observation that
Rossetti was the sister of a painter and that the objects of the
second stanza are not only popular ones in Victorian
representational art but are also those to be found particularly in
the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, framing the central
figure which was usually a woman.
The second stanza, then, is remarkably similar to the
background of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. But where is the
central figure? The words ‘Raise me a dais’ (1.9) may mean not
only the instruction of a craftsman to his assistants but may also
mean ‘Raise in our honour, a dais’. In other words, the speaker of
the poem (a woman like Rossetti herself ) would then take her
place on the dais. Rossetti certainly had ample experience of
posing as the central figure for such canvases. Thus she has
chosen as the highest representation of an intense human
emotion the Pre-Raphaelite painting, and it may be seen that the
poem outlines a similar aesthetic to that which Dante Gabriel
proposes in ‘Hand and Soul’ where the fixed image of a female
figure was used to convey the artistic message.
Yet the choice of detail in the second stanza shows an
awareness, typical of Rossetti, of the Christian implication of
such an aesthetic. The similarity in tone and diction of the
second stanza to the raising of the tabernacle recorded in
Exodus12 shows us that she recognized this artistic process as the
raising of a temple—not to God, but to the beauty of a human
emotion.
Here we may briefly refer to a poem which Rossetti composed
ten days before ‘A Birthday’, ‘Memory I.’13 The speaker in this
poem describes a bitter choice made in the breaking down of an
idol which had been set up in her heart:

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 None know the choice I made and broke my heart,
Breaking my idol: I have braced my will
Once, chosen for once my part.
(ll. 14–16)

L.M. Packer quotes in this connection a passage from Rossetti’s

prose work, Letter and Spirit:

The idolater substitutes in his heart and worship something material in

lieu of God; and as being material, akin to himself and unlike God ...14

If Rossetti were concerned about the breaking down of idols, in

the composition of ‘Memory I’, it is quite possible that she was
still similarly concerned in the writing of ‘A Birthday’.

NOTES
6. Festa, p. 50.
7. ‘Projection and Empathy in Victorian Poetry.’ VP 19:4 (1981) pp.
315–336.
8. E.S. Dallas, Poetics: An Essay on Poetry, London, 1852; rpt., New York:
Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1969. p. 47.
9. Packer, p. 115.
10. Festa, p. 52.
11. Ibid.
12. ... thou shalt make the tabernacle with ten curtains; of fine turned
linen, and blue and purple, and scarlet, with cherubim the work of the
cunning workmen shalt thou make them.
Exodus 26.1
13. Crump, p. 147. Composed Nov. 8 1857.
14. Packer, p. 114.

—Lynda Palazzo. “Notes & Reviews: Christina Rossetti’s ‘A

Birthday’: Representations of the ‘Poetic’ ” . The Journal of Pre-
Raphaelite Studies vol. VII, no. 2, May 1987: 94–95.

RICHARD D. LYNDE ON THE NATURAL WORLD

AND IMAGERY

[Richard D. Lynde has published “A Note on the Imagery

in Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Birthday’ ” in Victorian Poetry.]

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Whatever the reasons for its existence, an examination of the
natural and artificially made objects which it embodies will provide
a fascinating glimpse into the associative method of the mind which
produced it. The three natural objects of the first stanza, the
singing bird, the apple tree, and the rainbow shell, appear in their
native settings. As Christina herself said: “Common things
continually at hand, wind or windfall or budding bough, acquire a
sacred association, and cross our path under aspects at once familiar
and transfigured.”3 The objects found in the second stanza, the
doves and pomegranates, the peacocks, the gold and silver grapes,
and the leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys, either do not appear in their
natural settings or else are artistic renderings of natural objects.
They are commanded by the speaker of the poem to be wrought in
likeness upon a dais. The pomegranates are a particularization of
the fruit of the apple tree in stanza one, while the doves and
peacocks may be related to the bird in that stanza. All the images in
the second half of the poem, however, traditionally bear religious
meaning—even though their meaning here is secular—and reflect
an awareness of traditional Christian art.
Besides Christina Rossetti’s direct familiarity with the natural
world as it is represented in the first stanza, and her knowledge
of religious symbols as it appears in the second, there remain two
less obvious sources which may have suggested some of the
imagery in the poem. The first is in the world of commonplace
Victorian representational art. The pomegranate, for example,
occupied a prominent position in Georgian architecture, where
it figured in fruit and flower mouldings. And the peacock was, in
mid-nineteenth-century England, commonly depicted as a
modern Indian symbol woven into fabrics imported from that
country. Another connection between the commercial world and
the poem is suggested by the tradesmen’s signs still found in
some places in England, particularly the cities. In the second
stanza of “A Birthday” the speaker gives commands to craftsmen
who are obviously dyers: “Raise me a dais of silk and down; /
Hang it with vair and purple dyes.” As the painted sign of the
dyer in England traditionally included the peacock, the rainbow,
and the dove together, and as all of these appear in the short
space of the poem, quite possibly the author’s observation of such
a sign suggested this otherwise random combination.

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 A final possible source of imagery in this lyric is a unique one
connected with Christina Rossetti’s personal history. She was the
sister of an artist. “Her older brother was an art critic; her first
lover was an artist; she drew designs and illustrations for some of
her own poems. It came naturally to her to regard everything as
the possible foundation of a picture.”4 And she had even posed
for some of her brother’s paintings. In 1848–50 he had been
working on an Annunciation (Ecce Ancilla Domini) for which
Christina had modelled the Virgin. On this canvas the Angel is
holding a prominent lily which greatly resembles a series of
fleurs-de-lys, while another lily is depicted upon a sampler which
the Virgin had been embroidering. A dove represents the Holy
Spirit, as is traditional. In another of her brother’s religious
works, an oil entitled The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, started also in
1848 and for which she sat, appear a dove, a lily, and grape
bunches. These pictorial images from both paintings appear little
more than a decade later in “A Birthday.”
Their presence in the poem is consistent with William
Michael Rossetti’s observation that Christina’s “habits of
composing were eminently of the spontaneous kind ... something
impelled her feelings, or ‘came into her head,’ and her hand
obeyed the dictation.”5 The freely associative method within
which Christina worked probably led her to interrelate in this
poem diverse images remembered from direct observation, from
traditional Christian myth and artistic religious symbolism, from
acquaintance with commercial art of her day, and finally from her
unique experiences and memories as a member of an artistic
family.

NOTES
3. Seek and Find (London, 1879), p. 14.
4 Marjory A. Bald, “Christina Rossetti,” Women-Writers of the Nineteenth
Century (London, 1923), p. 253.
5. In his Preface to New Poems by Christina Rossetti (London, 1896), p. xiii.

—Richard D. Lynde. “A Note on the Imagery in Christina

Rossetti’s ‘A Birthday’ ” . Victorian Poetry vol. III, no. 4, autumn
1965: 261–263.

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JAMES F. DOUBLEDAY ON THE JUXTAPOSITION OF
IMAGES

[James F. Doubleday has published “Rossetti’s A Birthday”

in The Explicator.]

The effect of “A Birthday” comes in part from the tension

between two very different kinds of images and two very
different means by which these images are expressed. In the first
stanza, the means is a series of similes—the simplest and most
“natural” means of conveying an image. And the images
themselves are all natural ones: The singing bird, the thick-
laden apple-tree, the rainbow shell. But these images are in an
order of increasing distance. We can easily empathize with a
singing bird. It is more difficult to feel with a tree. And when we
come to the shell, particularly a shell that is given life (it
“paddles”) and placed in a “halcyon” sea, in a world of mythic
peace and tranquility, we have an image that is very hard to
realize imaginatively. Even so, the speaker finally rejects all three
natural images as inadequate to represent the splendor of her
feeling: “My heart is gladder than all these.”
So the next stanza uses a far different means and far different
images. The speaker, like an empress, commands the
construction of a dais to her specifications. The images are rich,
strange, exotic, Eastern: silk and down, vair and purple dyes,
pomegranates and peacocks, gold and silver work. But these
images are likewise inadequate to represent the speaker’s
experience. Therefore, after images from nature and art, the final
image, the “birthday,” is from common human life. But it is life
raised to a higher power: “the birthday of my life,” the beginning
of the vita nuova.
—James F. Doubleday. “Rossetti’s A Birthday”. From The
Explicator vol. 44, no. 2, winter 1986: 29–30.

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 C R I T I C A L A N A LY S I S O F

“Up-Hill”
This poem begins with what could be a simple question, and
gives a seemingly straightforward answer to that question. As we
progress through the poem, however, we realize that the
question is more figurative than literal, and the journey that the
poem describes is the inevitable human one towards death. By
describing death as an Inn, however, the poet suggests that, after
a night of rest, the journey may continue. The inn is all inclusive,
in that there are “beds for all who come”. The quality of one’s
rest in the inn is nonetheless subject to some higher
interpretation, as it is a direct function, or “sum”, of the labour
one has performed over the course of a lifetime.
The difference, in the poem, between day and night has
to do with the speed and quality of time. The day’s journey, or
life as we know it, is long and takes “from morn to night”. Once
rest begins, after the setting of the sun, the hours become “slow
and dark”, although not imperceptible. In general, the sense of
sight in the poem is subjected to the poem’s temporality, so that
the spiritual progress it enacts overwhelms our common sense of
space and time. The form of the poem, that of a seemingly clear
and somewhat rhetorical question that furnishes us with a
somewhat tenebrous rhetorical answer, is crucial to Rossetti’s
poetry, and biblical in feel.

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 CRITICAL VIEWS ON

“Up-Hill”
HAROLD BLOOM ON THE MEANING OF THE POEM

[In this excerpt, Professor Bloom explains his interpretation

of Rossetti’s poem, “Up-Hill.”]

It is very peculiar that both Rossettis now strike many unthinking

readers as rather tame, since both sister and brother frighten me
as poets, the more I ponder them. Christina would not yield to
Dante Gabriel’s self-destructiveness: the quality of her Christian
faith, severely intellectualized, saved her. And yet it is not an easy
faith to comprehend, whatever your own beliefs or skepticisms.
Here is her extraordinary “Up-Hill,” a poem I loved, but
misunderstood, for many years:

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?

A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?

Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?

Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

Jerome McGann first noted the apparent oddness of these two

final lines, which can seem a grotesque parody of Christian hope,

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until you realize—as he shows—that Christina adheres to the
strange Adventist doctrine of “Soul Sleep.” What happens to the
Christian’s soul between the moment of her death and the Great
Advent of Christ’s Second Coming? Does the soul go directly to
a Last Judgment, and then wait patiently in Paradise for a
Resurrected Body to join it? Or does it sleep a long sleep until at
Millennium it wakes up forever? Christina firmly adhered to the
latter view, a conviction that governs not only “Up-Hill,” but a
considerable number of her more interesting poems.
I depart (with gratitude) from McGann’s deeply informed
historicism to surmise that “Soul Sleep” allowed Christina to
hope that her charismatic but self-destructive older brother
would yet escape his erotic inferno in the vast slumber before his
own resurrection. Her final devotional book, The Face of the Deep
(1892), is the least judgmental commentary upon the Apocalypse
of Saint John the Divine that I have ever read. I give the last word
here to her charming memoir “The House of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti,” also published in 1892, two years before her own
death. She recalls the marvelous assemblage of friends and
creatures who surrounded her brother in his home on Cheyne
Walk in London, ranging from Algernon Swinburne and George
Meredith to an owl named Bobby and a wombat called
McGregor, and beholds them all as a vision by Lewis Carroll:

With such inhabitants, Tudor House and its grounds became a

sort of wonderland, and once the author of Wonderland
photographed us in the garden.

It is a comfort to think back to that moment, in the autumn of

1863, when the Reverend Charles Dodgson photographed the
Rossettis and the menagerie in Dante Gabriel’s garden. After so
much erotic travail, one wants to think of Alice, and the Snark.
—Harold Bloom. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina
Rossetti.” Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative
Minds. Warner Books, 2002: 432–434.

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EUGENE J. BRZENK ON THE LINKS BETWEEN
“UP-HILL” AND “AMOR MUNDI”

[Eugene J. Brzenk has published “Up-Hill and Down” in

Victorian Poetry. He also edited Imaginary Portraits by Walter
Pater.]

I wish to make a detailed, side-by-side examination of these two

poems [“Amor Mundi” and “Up-Hill”] to show that they are
more closely linked than Mrs. Packer or other commentators
have indicated, that to read either poem by itself, in fact, is to
miss an entire dimension of meaning and poetic effect. Such an
examination, by giving detailed attention to “Amor Mundi” as
well as to “Up-Hill,” will also help to adjust the balance of
critical attention between the two.
The most obvious link between the two poems under
consideration is their central metaphor representing life as a road
or path. Each poem describes one of the ways offered to the
individual in his journey through life; together they present a
pair of contrasting though complementary images which are
truly archetypal, for these divergent roads are found in the
earliest literatures and in all cultures and received definitive
expression in Matthew 7.13–14:

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the
way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in
thereat:

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth
unto life, and few there be that find it.

There are several other works known to Christina Rossetti from

childhood reading which figure in the background of this pair of
poems. The landscapes of “Amor Mundi” and “Up-Hill,” for
example, invite the same kind of allegorical interpretation that is

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suggested by such landmarks in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as the
Strait Way, the Gate, the Hill Difficulty, the Byway to Hell and
By-Path Meadow, landmarks which themselves echo the New
Testament passage. Two other well-known literary passages
using this image of the two roads leading to good and evil, to
salvation and damnation, include Spenser’s description in Book I
of The Faerie Queene of the paths leading to the House of Pride
(“A broad highway,” Canto iv, 17) and the House of Holiness
(“For streight and narrow was the way,” Canto x, 45) and
Ophelia’s speech to Laertes in Hamlet:

But, good my brother,

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own rede. (I, iii, 49–54)

Christina Rossetti’s use of a paired archetypal image which

echoes well-known works of literature not only links “Amor
Mundi” and “Up-hill,” it accounts for their great concentration
of meaning despite their relative brevity.
Examination of other ways in which “Up-Hill” and “Amor
Mundi” are linked reveals in both the happy correspondence
between form and content. In “Up-Hill,” the halting movement
of the short lines made up largely of monosyllables reproduces
the effort needed to reach “that inn”; there is no increment from
each paired question and answer or from stanza to stanza so that
each exchange has a finality of its own and further emphasizes
the laborious quality of the journey which the poem describes. In
“Amor Mundi” the tripping rhythm achieved through the use of
anapests and feminine and internal rhymes conveys the ease with
which the downhill path is negotiated. The movement of this
poem is incremental as realization of the nature of the trip grows
in each succeeding stanza until the final climactic reply is given:
“ ‘ This downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back’.” The
slowing down at the end of the line is just one more example of
the poet’s use of rhythm and movement to underscore meanings.
But the relationship of meter and rhythm to mood and theme

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in both poems is more than one of exact correspondences. The
changing, shifting meter of “Amor Mundi” actually characterizes
the primrose-path mentality, but the blithe movement of the
poem, recalling nursery rhymes or some of the livelier poems
from Sing-Song, is ironic since the downhill path is ultimately
revealed as “hell’s own track.” Ironically also, the goal of “Up-
Hill” hardly seems inviting with its promise that “Of labour you
shall find the sum,” yet anyone familiar with Christina Rossetti’s
personal conception of salvation and the difficult road which
leads to it recognizes that the whole movement of the poem is
intended to convey this very austere conception. This attention
in both poems to movement and rhythm to underline meanings
and to characterize contrasting points of view provides another
link between them.
The very appearance of each poem on the page indicates
something of its nature. The short line lengths of “Up-Hill” give
the terse questions and answers of that poem, fittingly, the
appearance as well as the sound of a catechism. “Amor Mundi”
is, on the other hand, typographically expansive, for the fines of
the poem take up the width of a page in collections where most
other poems are printed in double columns. It should be noted,
however, that cutting the four lines of each stanza exactly in half
converts the internal rhymes into end rhymes and produces a
poem consisting of five eight-line stanzas rhyming aaabccxb. This
pattern is repeated with complete regularity in the four
remaining stanzas so that the poem could be considered as one
made up of the trimeter line which is basic to some of Christina’s
best known poems. However, the fact that the poet chose to
disguise this complex rhyming pattern by making each stanza
consist of four long lines with frequent run-ons indicates that it
was their sweep and rapidity which she wished to emphasize.
The diction of “Up-Hill” and “Amor Mundi” has the
simplicity and directness of folk literature, although the latter
draws more heavily than its companion piece upon the stock
phrases of such works. It includes the number seven so
indispensable to folk rhymers and such archaic-sounding
expressions as “lovelocks” “an’ it please ye,” “doat on,” “scaled
and hooded worm,” “the eternal term” and “thou beatest,” but

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they are scattered throughout the five stanzas so that the poem is
not primarily dependent upon them for its effect; the rest of the
poem is conventional in its diction, often colloquial, and like
“Up-hill,” basically Anglo-Saxon. The vocabulary of “Up-Hill,”
in fact, consists mainly of such familiar nouns as “road,” “roof,”
“inn,” “night,” “door,” “labour,” and “beds” and verbs like
“take,” “begin,” “hide,” “miss,” “meet,” “knock,” and “find.” In
both poems it is evident that Christina did not follow her brother
Dante Gabriel’s practice of reading through old romances for
what he called “stunning words for poetry,” and the fact that she
changed line 18 of “Amor Mundi” which originally read: “This
way whereof thou weetest, I fear is hell’s own track,” indicates
clearly that the self-consciously antique was not the effect she
wanted.
“Amor Mundi” and “Up-Hill” have other similarities to folk
literature in addition to those already mentioned. For example,
“Amor Mundi,” which Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti
thought reminiscent of “The Demon Lover,” uses question-and-
answer dialogue and the journey motif as does the traditional
work, and both deal with the theme of temptation, one which is
central to many of Christina’s poems. Unlike the folk ballad’s
rather circumstantial account, the Rossetti poem is not primarily
concerned with telling a story, and only the second stanza of this
literary ballad is essentially narrative. As in “Up-Hill,” the basic
situation is universalized rather than particularized, and the
primary focus in both is psychological, or one might say,
existential.
Another characteristic of a large body of folk ballads, the
interweaving of the natural and the supernatural, can also be seen
in “Up-Hill” and “Amor Mundi,” for although the speakers in
the two poems are not identified, the second speaker in each, the
one who makes reply, seems to be one of “Those who have gone
before.” Christina Rossetti used the motif of the revenant in a
variety of ways in numerous poems; her early sonnet, “After
Death,” depicts a dead woman speaking as her lover leans over
her bier, and in “A Chilly Night,” the speaker echoes a refrain
often found in traditional ballads as she begs the spirit of her
dead mother, “Oh, Mother, make a lonely bed for me.” Often the

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revenants are recriminatory, either because, as in “The Ghost’s
Petition,” excessive mourning has made it impossible for the
dead to rest, or because a loved one has broken a vow as in “The
Poor Ghost” and “The Hour and the Ghost.”
There are many questions concerning the speakers in the two
poems (is it significant, for instance, that “Amor Mundi” uses
quotation marks to indicate the change of speakers while “Up-
hill” does not?), and identification of the second speakers as
revenants need not be insisted upon although such an
interpretation lends depth to this pair of poems and further links
them.
The poems’ central image also relates them to one other folk
ballad dealing with the supernatural, the well-known “Thomas
Rymer,” in which at one point the Queen of Elfland bids
Thomas to lean his head upon her knee as she shows him “fairlies
three”:

‘O see not ye yon narrow road,

So thick beset wi thorns and briers?
That is the path of righteousness,
Tho after it but few enquires.

‘And see not ye that braid braid road

That lies across yon lillie leven?
That is the path of wickedness,
Tho some call it the road to heaven.

‘And see not ye that bonny road

That winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Whe[re] thou and I this night maun gae.’
(Child 37A)

Here the image of the divergent roads open to the individual

depicts a third alternative, and it is tempting to speculate
whether the poet might eventually have enlarged her pair of
poems into the usual triad. But there is little evidence that the
bonny road, the one taken by the poet-seer, would have appealed
to her, for poems celebrating dedication to art, poetry, and the

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life of the imagination are conspicuously absent from Christina
Rossetti’s poetry. “Up-Hill” and “Amor Mundi,” in fact,
epitomize the contrasting themes of duty and temptation, the
two main roads which provide the tension and substance of many
of her major works. They might easily have been entitled “Amor
Mundi” and “De Contemptu Mundi” or “Down-Hill” and “Up-
Hill.”
Seeing the two poems side by side has revealed how closely
linked they are in subject matter, imagery, theme, form, and
language, with folk and ballad themes and motifs as another
pervasive link. Most importantly, this reading of the poems has
demonstrated that they should be printed as companion pieces,
for like the paired poems of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of
Experience, they set off and reinforce one another through their
resemblances and contrasts. Hopefully, this study has also shown
that “Amor Mundi” is as worthy of critical attention as its more
frequently anthologized companion.
—Eugene J. Brzenk. “Up-Hill and Down-”. Victorian Poetry vol.
10, no. 4, winter 1972: 367–371.

EUGENE ZASADINSKI ON RELIGIOUS INTERPRETATION

AND SYMBOLISM

[Eugene Zasadinski has published “Christina Rossetti’s ‘A

Better Resurrection’ and ‘Up-Hill’ Self-Reliance and its
Limitations” in The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies.]

“Up-Hill” also lends itself easily to conventional Anglican

interpretation. The central metaphor states that life is a journey,
and the poem is structured as a dialogue between the persona,
who asks questions pertaining to the afterlife, and an unknown
voice, which replies somewhat enigmatically. Barbara Fass
(“Christina Rossetti and St. Agnes’ Eve,” VP, 14, 1976) says (45):
“In ‘Up-Hill’ ... the poet ... prepares to climb ... asking anxiously,
however, about what she can expect on her trip.” Ralph Bellas
(Christina Rossetti, Boston: Twayne, 1977) remarks that the poem
illustrates Christina’s belief that (67) “fulfillment in God meant a

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long and arduous journey.” The first stanza establishes the
figurative equivalents necessary to understanding the rest of the
poem. The ascending motion projects the idea of a heavenly
destination. Life is equated with daylight hours; death, with
night. The second stanza asks, (5) “But is there for the night a
resting-place?” This question prepares the reader for the second
major metaphor of the poem, the comparison of the “resting-
place” to an inn. The idea of protection is subtly introduced and
the concept of death as a dark void countered by (6) “roof ” and
(12) “door.” The metaphor is psychologically appropriate: the
security of the material world is imposed upon infinity. The
metaphor has the effect of ‘ordering’ chaos.
Nonetheless, the metaphor does not seem adequate for the
poet, possibly because the chaos it confines is spiritual, while the
order that it imposes emanates from this life; hence (11) “Then
must I knock, or call when just in sight?” The allusion is to St.
John: (Apocalypse, 3:20) “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,”
and unobtrusively invests the metaphor of the inn with the aura
of genuine mystical vision, with Biblical authority. The stanza
also summons up (9) “other wayfarers” who, presumably, will
welcome the speaker into the fold. Of them the unknown voice
says, (12) “They will not keep you standing at that door,”
indicating, along conventional lines, that salvation is assured to
the soul that seeks it. The final stanza supplies several additional
instances of this reassurance. The central idea of (13) “comfort”
for the speaker, (13) “travel-sore and weak,” is reinforced by the
imagery of sleep. There are (15) “beds” for (15) “all who seek”
and (16) “for all who come.”
The poem becomes infinitely more intriguing and yields
fascinating results when one attempts a heterodox interpretation.
Indeed, only a heterodox reading can aesthetically justify the
metrical saliency of lines three and twelve. Line three, “Will the
day’s journey take the whole long day?”, receives its metrical
irregularity from the third word “day’s.” Without this word,
which is a homonym for ‘daze’, the line would be regular and
directly correspond to the metrics of the first line, providing
symmetry to the stanza. Because a conventional reading can deal
with this problematic line only by declaring it faulty, a heterodox

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reading may be adopted to justify Christina’s precise handling of
it.
The seemingly redundant use of “day’s” and “day” highlights
the metaphoric distinction between life and death represented
respectively by day and night. These assigned equivalents present
no great problem to an Anglican reading of the poem; yet, if one
considers their full implications in a heterodox reading, a rather
frightening vision of the afterlife emerges. Indeed, as Georgina
Battiscombe (Christina Rossetti, London: Longmans, Green and
Co., Ltd., 1965) rightly notes: “Sometimes ... Christina would
write of death in a way that was neither peaceful nor triumphant
nor in fact Christian at all.” And Lona Mosk Packer (Christina
Rossetti, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), calls
attention to Christina’s (402–03) “strong fear of death, not only
the death of the body, but even more, the death of the spirit.”
Symbolically, “day” signifies light, vision, awareness, warmth,
and, if one extends the metaphor to include daybreak, rebirth.
Each of these attributes might easily be used to describe a
positive view of the afterlife. Instead, Christina equates the
afterlife in “Up-Hill” with night and its sinister connotations of
blindness, ignorance, and even oblivion. This heterodox vision is
further emphasized by (6) “A roof for when the slow dark hours
begin.” Three elements here reveal a negative apprehension of
the afterlife. First, whereas a soul in the presence of the Beatific
Vision would not be aware of the passage of time, the “Up-Hill”
spirit is not only cognizant of time but anxiously so. Second, the
kinesthetic imagery and metrics of the line suggest bumbling,
plodding, groping, stumbling against things and knocking them
over. Third, the lack of a comma in “slow dark hours”
underscores the idea of eternally uninterrupted darkness. Line
seven adds the speaker’s fear of the encroaching abyss: “May not
darkness hide it from my face?” The unknown voice ironically
replies: (8) “You cannot miss that inn.” Why? Because the
terrified speaker is the inn. Unenlightened, the persona carries it
with her in her soul. Far from supplying a simplistic ‘Christian’
affirmation of the conventional tenet that all believers are saved,
“Up-Hill” uses allusions to the Apocalypse in devastating
counterpoint: (21:26) “For there shall be no night there” and

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(22:5) “The night shall be no more, and they shall have no need
of light of lamp.”
Line twelve, “They will not keep you standing at that door,”
follows another allusion to the Apocalypse: (11) “Then must I
knock...?” Having arrived at the inn after death, the persona is
confronted by (9) “other wayfarers at night.” This is curious,
since in the Apocalypse we read: (3:20–21) “Be earnest therefore
and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man
listens to my voice and opens the door to me, I will come in to
him and will sup with him, and he with me. He who overcomes,
I will permit him to sit with me upon my throne; as I also have
overcome and have sat with my Father on his throne.” According
to this, mutatis mutandis, the ‘wayfarer’ should be greeted by
Christ Who appears on the other side of (12) “that door.”
Instead, the spirits of the dead swarm to meet her. Here,
convention is reversed. It is not Christ Who knocks at the door;
it is the persona, convinced that, since she is traveling ‘up-hill’,
she must be on the road to “comfort.” Actually, Christ
‘overcame’ by going ‘down-hill’, even to hell. In “Up-Hill,” the
persona functions, in effect, as a soi-disant Christ. In this
heterodox reading, the inn is a metaphor not for heaven but for
a sort of limbo, where uneasy souls await their individual
judgment, or even for hell itself, where the soul’s chief agony is
the absence of God and the constant delusion it experiences
when not Christ but another soul like itself knocks at the door.
The final stanza is the bleakest since it adds some rather
frightening touches. Certainly, the stanza may be read in
conventional Anglican fashion: (5) “resting-place” and “comfort”
are offered to the (13) “travel-sore and weak.” However, this boon
is tactfully played off against the obviously manic overtones of the
earthly struggle, the “Up” in “Up-Hill,” and the ambiguities
inherent in such rest and comfort suggest an almost antinomian
admission of the unreliability of human reason to supply the
speaker with any certitude regarding salvation and the afterlife.
Also, these two terms require close attention because they are so
clearly stressed in the persona’s question, (5) “But is there for the
night a resting–place?”, and in the final stanza: (13–16)

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 Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yes, beds for all who come.

Rest is not promised; all the persona is told is that the soul shall
receive (6) “A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.” And the
answer to the question of comfort (14) implies a theological
distinction between Anglicanism (orthodoxy in terms of this
discussion) and Roman Catholicism (heterodoxy). Within its
credal Thirty-Nine Articles, Anglicanism adopted the Lutheran
position that justification is by faith alone. Article XI (“Of the
Justification of Man”) reads:

We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own
works or deservings. Wherefore, that we are justified by Faith
only, is almost wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort, as
more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.

Note the word “comfort.” The unknown voice’s answer, “Of

labour you shall find the sum,” oscillates with the Roman
Catholic position (James 2:17–18) on the value of good works in
the soul’s achieving justification and salvation, and the sardonic
corroboration implied by the answer of a positive response to the
speaker’s plea for a “resting-place” and “comfort” suggests a
quite pessimistic outcome. Since the ambiguous responses reflect
the via media, the ‘having it both ways’, of Anglicanism, which
must have impressed Christina as evasive—her family crest bore
the inscription “Frangas, non flectas” (“You can break, but you
can’t bend”), the definite promise of “beds” is startling. Duplicity
culminates here, and “beds” may very well mean the pain of racks
or torture instruments. Christina concretizes abstract damnation
in the manner of Dante Alighieri. The “beds,” coupled with the
restrictive, even claustrophobic “roof ” and the inn itself, evoke
coffins in a crypt where the dead count the “slow dark hours” of
eternity. The irony is that the supposed dead are conscious of
having been buried alive—alive to the sense of loss which is hell.
The “comfort” of the soul in heaven, the Beatific Vision, is not

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promised in this poem; and the effect of excluding God from
“Up-Hill” is to shift emphasis from guaranteed salvation, despite
lack of effort on the part of the individual, to a morally strong
position from which an individual may earn salvation, as a
Christian believer responsive to the will of Christ, through
action here on earth: “Of labour you shall find the sum.”
The identity of the addressee, who calls the persona (4) “my
friend,” is left open. Perhaps, as Eugene Brzenk (“ ‘ Up-Hill’ and
‘Down’ by Christina Rossetti,” VP, 10, 1972) obliquely suggests
(370–371), he is a revenant, one of (10) “Those who have gone
before” and thereby qualified to welcome the initiate to a similar
experience. But why is the persona his “friend”? Such deliberate
vagueness adds to the reasons which allow a heterodox reading of
the poem. In the Apocalypse, St. John’s vision of the afterlife is
guided by Christ through one of His angels. But if the inn is hell,
the addressee may be one of Satan’s fallen angels.

NOTE
I am grateful to my colleague James Hafley for this germinal idea. All quotations
from the poems are from The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, I, 65–66, 68;
ed. R.W. Crump (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).

—Eugene Zasadinski. “Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Better

Resurrection’ and ‘Up-Hill’ Self-Reliance and its Limitations”.
The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies vol. IV, no. 2 May 1984:
94–98

JEROME MCGANN ON ROSSETTI’S DOCTRINE AND THE

POEM

[In this excerpt, McGann explains Rossetti’s belief system

and its impact on the poem.]

The well-known lyric ‘Up-Hill’ is a useful place to start. In

certain obvious ways, this moving poem follows a traditional
model, and its all but explicit forebears are two of Herbert’s most
familiar pieces, ‘The Pilgrimage’ and the last poem in The
Temple, ‘Love (III)’. When we set Rossetti’s poem beside the two

107
by Herbert we will perhaps be initially struck by the difference in
tone: Rossetti’s poem is melancholy (one might even say
‘morbid’) whereas Herbert’s two lyrics discover and disclose their
religious confidence in their respective conclusions:

‘My hill was further; so I flung away,

Yet heard a crie,
Just as I went, ‘None goes that way
And lives.’ ‘If that be all,’ said I,
After so foul a journey death is fair,
And but a chair.’
(‘The Pilgrimage’)

‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’

So I did sit and eat.
(‘Love (III)’)

If Herbert’s pilgrimage has been long and weary, and if his soul—
conscious that it is ‘Guilty of dust and sin’—at first hesitates to
accept Love’s invitation, in the end all comes to confidence,
content, and even joy. For at the end of his life the Christian (this
Christian) comes to the feast of the blessed, and a place in the
house of God.
In Rossetti it is different, and the difference is signalled in the
startling last two lines of her poem. The speaker questions her
divine interlocutor about the pilgrimage but the answers she gets
are strange and mysteriously portentous through the first twelve
lines. Finally, however, Rossetti is told, in a disturbingly
ambiguous phrase, that her laborious journey will be complete:
‘Of labour you shall find the sum.’ The poem then concludes:

Will there be beds for me and all who seek?

Yea, beds for all who come.

Surely this seems a peculiar way to end a poem which seems to

describe the pilgrimage of the Christian soul to its final reward.
No ‘feast’ opens before her final eyes, nor does she seem to
believe that the dying Christian should expect to receive
anything other than a bed, presumably to sleep in. The image is

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almost grotesque in its lowliness, and not far from a parody of
such exalted Christian ideas that at death we go to our eternal
rest, or to sleep in the bosom of God. Does Rossetti imagine that
when we go to heaven we shall sleep away our paradise, or is she
simply a weak-minded poet, sentimentally attached to certain
traditional phrases and ideas which she has not really thought
through?
The conclusion of ‘Up-Hill’ would not have been written as it
was if Rossetti had not subscribed to, and thoroughly pondered
the artistic possibilities of, the peculiar millenarian and
Anabaptist doctrine known popularly as ‘Soul Sleep’.20 This idea,
in a richly dispersed and elaborated variety of poetic forms,
pervades the work of her greatest years as a poet, i.e., the period
of 1848–75. It takes its origin from the time of Luther (whose
position on the matter was unsettled), and it means to deal with
the problem of the so-called ‘waiting time’, i.e., the period
between a person’s death and the Great Advent (or Second
Coming). The orthodox view distinguishes between the
Particular Judgement, which the soul undergoes at death, and
the General Judgement, which takes place at the end of the
world. According to traditional doctrine (epitomized in
Episcopalian and Roman Catholic theology), the soul at death
passes to its final reward (I leave aside here the possibility of a
purgatorial period) and suffers no ‘waiting time’. The body
corrupts in the grave and is reunited with the emparadised soul
on the Last Day.
According to Adventist doctrine of Soul Sleep, however, death
initiates the period during which the soul is placed in a state of
‘sleeping’ or suspension. Only at the Millennium, on the Last Day,
is that sleep broken and the soul confronted with its final reward.
There is no question that Rossetti adhered to the doctrine of
Soul Sleep, for it can be found at all levels of tenor and vehicle in
her work. From her earliest to her latest poems—from works like
‘Dream-Land’ composed in 1849 (and placed third in her first
published volume) to the famous culminant lyric ‘Sleeping at Last’,
written in 1893 or early 1894—this premillenarian concept is the
single most important enabling principle in Rossetti’s religious
poetry. By this I mean that no other idea generated such a network

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of poetic possibilities for her verse, that no other idea contributed
so much to the concrete and specific character of her work.
Most obviously, the doctrine provides a ground from which
Rossetti can both understand and judge her sense of the
insufficiency of a mortal existence. The pervasive theme of
vanitas vanitatum is generated and maintained through the
energy of an emotional weariness, through a sense that living in
the world is scarcely worth the effort it requires, since what the
world has to offer is, in any case, mere vanity, empty promises,
betrayal. Soul Sleep is precisely what would appear to be the first
and greatest need of the weary pilgrim under such circumstances;
in a word, it answers to the most fundamental emotional demand
which Rossetti’s poetry sets forth. In addition, however, the
doctrine validates Rossetti’s peculiarly passive stance toward the
world’s evil. Rossetti’s negative judgements of the world do not
take the form of a resistance but of a withdrawal—a strategic
withdrawal carried out under the premillenarian consciousness
that any commitment to the world is suicidal. It is highly
significant that one of the principal sections of her 1893 volume
of devotional poems, Verses, should have been headed ‘The
World. Self-Destruction’.

NOTE
20. The technical term for this doctrine is psychopannychism; the OED
defines psychopannychy as ‘the state in which (according to some) the soul
sleeps between death and the day of judgment’. For discussion see O. Cullmann,
Immortality of the Soul of Resurrection of the Dead?, New York, 1958, and two
papers by J. Héring, ‘Entre la mort et la resurrection’, Review of the History of
Philosophy and Religion xl (1960), pp. 338–48 and ‘Eschatologie biblique et
idéalisme platonicien’, in The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology,
ed. W.D. Davies and D. Daube, Cambridge, 1956, pp. 443–63.

—Jerome J. McGann. “Periodization and Christina Rossetti.” The

Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and
Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985: 241–244.

JOHN HOLLANDER ON THE ALLEGORICAL READING

[John Hollander is the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of
English at Yale and a Chancellor of the Academy of

110
 American Poets. His many honors include the Bollingen
Prize in Poetry and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.]
Apocrises abound in literature, and often the force of figurative
catechism, or some other form of ritual questioning, lends them
more than oratorical force. Christina Rossetti’s “Up-Hill,” a
wonderful little allegory of life’s journey, unfolds in full
catechistic language, although it is never determined who the
two speakers are:

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?

A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Perhaps only at this point in the answering of questions do we

begin to perceive that the matter may be an allegorical one, and
that such archaic figures as that of darkness hiding an inn from
one’s face may indeed imply their own reversal, that the darkness
is no ordinary one, and that we all hide our faces from it. The
poem concludes with a grim avowal of the unlimited capacities of
the grave:

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?

Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at the door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?

Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

—a conclusion which will give consolation only to a Christian

reader who can fully take the “inn” of death as resting-place on

111
an even longer journey. Rossetti’s poem stops short of belonging
to that genre of poetic dialogue called by scholars amoebean, and
usually associated with pastoral, in which there is an overt or
implied contest of poetic skill between the two voices. But
neither are the two voices fully incorporated in the tone of one
speaker, probing its own discourse.
—John Hollander. “Poetic Answers”. Melodious Guile: Fictive
Pattern in Poetic Language. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988: 43–44.

112
 WORKS BY

Christina Rossetti
Verses Dedicated to her Mother, 1847.
Goblin Market and Other Poems, 1862.
The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, 1866.
Commonplace, and Other Short Stories, 1870.
Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, 1872.
Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year, Founded on A Text
of Holy Scripture, 1874.
Speaking Likenesses, 1874.
Poems Added in Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress and Other
Poems, 1875.
Seek and Find, 1879.
A Pageant and Other Poems, 1881.
Called to be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied, 1881.
Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments, 1883.
Time Flies: A Reading Diary, 1885.
The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse,
1892.
Poems Added in Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, 1893.
Verses, 1893.
New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected, 1896.
Maude, a Story for Girls, 1897.
The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, with Memoir and
Notes by William Michael Rossetti, 1904.
The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed.
William Michael Rossetti, 1968.
Selected Poems, 1979.
The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Vavorium Edition, ed.
R.W. Crump, 1979.

113
Christina Rossetti: Poems and Prose, ed. Jan Marsh, 1994.
Letters of Christina Rossetti: 1843–1873, 1997.
Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent and
P.G. Stanwood, 1998.
Letters of Christina Rossetti: 1874–1881, 1999.

114
 WORKS ABOUT

Christina Rossetti
Arseneau, Mary. “Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina
Rossetti, the Oxford Movement, and Goblin Market.”
Victorian Poetry 31.1 (1993): 79–93
———, ed. The Culture of Christina Rossetti. Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1999.
Bellas, Ralph A. Christina Rossetti. Illinois: Illinois State
University Press, 1977.
Bowra, C.M. The Romantic Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1949.
D’Amico, Diane. Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender, and Time.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.
Dombrowski, Theo. “Dualism in the Poetry of Christina
Rossetti.” Victorian Poetry 14 (1976): 70–6.
Garlitz, Barbara. “Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song and
Nineteenth-Century Children’s Poetry.” Publications of the
Modern Language Association (1955): 539–43
Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Sarah. The Madwoman in the Attic.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Harrison, Antony H. Christina Rossetti in Context. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina, 1988.
Honninghausen, Gisela. “Emblematic Tendencies in the Works
of Christina Rossetti.” Victorian Poetry 10 (1972): 1–15
Janowitz, K.E. “The Antipodes of Self: Three Poems by
Christina Rossetti.” Victorian Poetry 3 (1965):261–3
Jimenez, Nilda. The Bible and the Poetry of Christina Rossetti: A
Concordance. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979.
Kent, David A. (ed) The Achievement of Christina Rossetti. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1987.
Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the
Heart. New York: University Press of Virginia, 1992.

115
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography. London:
Jonathan Cape, 1994.
Mayberry, Katherine J. Christina Rossetti and the Poetry of
Discovery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1989.
McGann, Jerome J. “Christina Rossetti’s Poems: A New Edition
and a Revaluation,” Victorian Studies 23 (1980): 237–54.
———. “The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti,” Critical
Inquiry 10 (1983): 133–41.
Rees, Joan. “Christina Rossetti: Poet,” Critical Quarterly 26
(1984): 59–72.
Rosenblum, Dolores. Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
Stevenson, Lionel. The Pre-Raphaelite Poets. North Carolina: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1972.
Weathers, Winston. “Christina Rossetti: The Sisterhood of
Self.” Victorian Poetry 3 (1965):81–9
Woolf, Virginia. Second Common Reader. New York: Harcourt,
Brace And Company, 1932.

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Speaking Likenesses”: Language and Repetition in Christina
Rossetti’s Goblin Market by Steven Connor. From Victorian
Poetry vol. 22, no. 4, winter 1984: 439–441. © 1984 by Steven
Connor. Reprinted by permission.

“Rossetti’s Goblin Marketing: Sweet to Tongue and Sound to

Eye” by Herbert F. Tucker. From Representations 82, spring
2003: 117–120. © 2003 by The Regents of the University of
California. Reprinted by permission.

“Christina Rossetti: The Sisterhood of Self ” by Winston

Weathers. From Victorian Poetry vol. III, 1965: 81–83. © 1965
by Winston Weathers. Reprinted by permission.

“Men sell not such in any town”: Exchange in Goblin Market by

Terrence Holt. From Victorian Poetry vol. 28, no. 1, spring
1990: 51–54. © 1990 by Terrence Holt. Reprinted by
permission.

“Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford

Movement, and Goblin Market” by Mary Arseneau. From
Victorian Poetry vol. 31, no. 1, spring 1993: 79–84. © 1993 by
Mary Arseneau. Reprinted by permission.

Tasting the “Fruit Forbidden” by Catherine Maxwell. From The

Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian
Contexts, eds. Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. Athens: Ohio University Press,
1999: 80–85. © 1999 by Ohio University Press. Reprinted by
permission.

“The Political Economy of Fruit” by Richard Menke. From The

Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian
Contexts, eds. Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. Athens: Ohio University Press,

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 1999: 105–111. © 1999 by Ohio University Press. Reprinted
by permission.

“ ‘ Visualizing the Fantastic Subject’: Goblin Market and the

Gaze” by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. From The Cultures of
Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, eds.
Mary Arsenau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen
Kooistra. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999: 137–142.
Reprinted by permission.

“Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti” by Harold

Bloom. From Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary
Creative Minds: 432–434, 437–439. © 2002 by Harold Bloom.
Reprinted by permission.

“Speaking Unlikenesses” by Margaret Reynolds. From Textual

Practice, January 1997: 12–17. © 1997 by Margaret Reynolds.
Reprinted by permission.

“Notes & Reviews: Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Birthday’:

Representations of the ‘Poetic’ ” by Lynda Palazzo. From The
Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies vol. VII, no. 2, May 1987:
94–95.© 1987 by Lynda Palazzo. Reprinted by permission.

“A Note on the Imagery in Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Birthday’ ” by

Richard D. Lynde. From Victorian Poetry vol. III, no. 4,
autumn 1965: 261–263. © 1965 by Richard D. Lynde.
Reprinted by permission.

“Rossetti’s A Birthday” by James F. Doubleday. From The

Explicator vol. 44, no. 2, winter 1986: 29–30. © 1986 by
Heldref Publications. Reprinted with permission of the Helen
Dwight Reid Educational Foundation.

“Up-Hill and Down-” by Eugene J. Brzenk. From Victorian

Poetry vol. 10, no. 4, winter 1972: 367–371. © 1972 by Eugene
J. Brzenk. Reprinted by permission.

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“Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Better Resurrection’ and ‘Up-Hill:’ Self
Reliance and its Limitations” by Eugene Zasadinski. From
The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies vol. IV, no. 2 May 1984:
94–98. © 1984 by Eugene Zasadinski. Reprinted by
permission.

“Periodization and Christina Rossetti” by Jerome J. McGann.

From The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in
Historical Method and Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985:
220–229, 241–244. © 1985 by Oxford University Press.
Reprinted by permission.

“Poetic Answers” by John Hollander. From Melodious Guile:

Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1988: 43–44. © 1988 by Yale University Press.
Reprinted by permission.

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 INDEX OF

Themes and Ideas

“AFTER DEATH,” 77–78, 82, 100
“AMOR MUNDI,” 97–102
ANNUS DOMINI: A PRAYER FOR EACH DAY OF THE YEAR,
FOUNDED ON A TEXT OF HOLY SCRIPTURE, 39, 113
“APPLE GATHERING, AN,” 48
“BIRTHDAY, A,” 9; critical analysis, 83–84; critical views, 85–93;
imagery in, 83–84, 88, 90–93; repetitive use of comparison in,
83
“CHILLY NIGHT, A,” 100
“COBWEBS,” 19
COMMONPLACE AND OTHER SHORT STORIES, 79–80, 113
“CONVENT THRESHOLD, THE,” 19
“DEAD BEFORE DEATH,” 19
“DEMON LOVER, THE,” 100
“DREAM-LAND,” 109
FACES OF THE DEEP: A DEVOTIONAL COMMENTARY ON
THE APOCALYPSE, 39, 96
“FROM SUNSET TO STAR-RISE,” 18
“GHOST’S PETITION, THE,” 101
“GOBLIN MARKET,” 9–10; allegory in, 11, 21, 43, 49, 62–72;
capacity to settle in, 18–20; critical analysis, 13–17; critical
views, 18–72; forces at work in, 29–33; image of longing in, 16;
imagination in, 42–49; Laura in, 14–17, 22–24, 28–30, 32, 34,
40, 43, 45–48, 52, 55, 58–60, 62–68, 71; Lizzie in, 14, 16–17,
22–23, 25, 28–31, 34, 40, 43, 45, 47–48, 58–62, 64–65, 67–71;
materiality of, 49–55; poetic fantasy of, 56–62; sisterhood and
self in, 27–29, 67, 69, 71; symbols in, 16, 34–40, 63; synthetic
principle of, 15; Victorian style of markets in, 21–25, 48, 70

120
GOBLIN MARKET AND OTHER POEMS, 13, 22, 39–40, 43, 80,
113
“GOOD FRIDAY,” 88
“HE AND SHE,” 18
“HOUR AND THE GHOST, THE,” 101
“HOUSE OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI,” 96
LETTER AND SPIRIT: NOTES ON THE COMMANDMENTS,
38, 40, 90, 113
“LIFE AND DEATH,” 18
“LOST TITIAN, THE,” 79–80
“MEMORY I,” 89–90
“NOBLE SISTERS,” 27
“ONE FOOT IN SEA AND ONE ON SHORE,” 18
“POEMS FOR CHILDREN, AND MINOR VERSE,” 20
“POOR GHOST, THE,” 101
“QUEEN OF HEARTS, THE,” 27
“REMEMBER,” 9; alternative readings of, 75–82; critical analysis,
73–74; critical views, 75–82; five uses of remember in, 75; nos-
talgia in, 73–74; representation of poetic sensation, 87–90
ROSSETTI, CHRISTINA, 10; belief system, 107–10; biography
of, 12–13; Dante Gabriel’s influence on, 85–89, 95–96, 100;
Keats’ influence on, 9–10, 25, 43, 45–46, 69, 71; works about,
115–16; works by, 113–14
“ROYAL PRINCESS,” 27
SEEK AND FIND: A DOUBLE SERIES OF SHORT STUDIES OF
THE BENEDICITE, 38, 113
SING-SONG: A NURSERY RHYME BOOK, 19, 99, 113
“SISTER MAUDE,” 27
“SLEEPING AT LAST,” 109

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“THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT,” 37
“THOMAS RYMER,” 101
“TRIAD, A,” 27
“TWO CHARADES,” 20
“TWO ENIGMAS,” 20
“UP-HILL,” 9; critical analysis, 94; critical views, 95–112; diver-
gent roads imagery in, 97–102, 111–12; meaning of, 95–96; reli-
gious interpretation and symbolism in, 102–7; Rossetti’s belief
system in, 107–10
VERSES: DEDICATED TO HER MOTHER, 12, 110, 113

122